Pinta

Pinta is the drawing and image editing app for people who want more than Microsoft Paint but have no interest in learning GIMP. Free, open source under the MIT license, and identical on Windows, macOS and Linux, it covers everyday editing - cropping, resizing, retouching, sketching - without asking you to read a manual first.

The layout feels familiar within minutes. Tools sit in a left-hand palette, adjustments and effects live in the top menus, and every image opens in its own tab. Right-click menus and keyboard shortcuts match what other editors use, so muscle memory transfers. Layers with blend modes let you build up compositions properly, and the unlimited undo history means you can walk any experiment back, step by step, all the way to a blank canvas.

Under the hood, Pinta 3 is a full rewrite onto GTK4 and Libadwaita, so the interface looks modern on every platform and supports trackpad gestures. The effects collection covers the practical range: blurs, sharpening, noise, distortions and artistic filters, plus adjustments for levels, curves, hue and saturation, all with live previews so you see the result before you commit. Version 3 also brought back the add-in system, so community plugins can add new effects, brushes and file formats.

It is genuinely light: the Windows installer is under 60MB, the app starts fast, and it runs comfortably on older hardware where heavier editors struggle. That makes it a good fit for classrooms, aging laptops and anyone who just needs to annotate a screenshot or touch up a photo quickly.

Development is steady and public on GitHub, led by Cameron White with community contributors, and releases arrive a few times a year. The current version is 3.1.2, released April 2, 2026.

A note on the numbers: this figure covers GitHub release downloads only; it does not include downloads from other channels or represent unique users.

The honest limits: Pinta is a raster editor with no vector tools, no CMYK support and no non-destructive adjustment layers, so print professionals and heavy photo editors will outgrow it. The add-in ecosystem is small compared to GIMP's, and new major releases have occasionally shipped with regressions that point releases fix a few weeks later. There is no mobile or web version.

For quick edits, pixel art, digital painting practice and general image cleanup, Pinta hits a comfortable middle ground - simple enough for a beginner, capable enough that you will not need anything else for everyday work.