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I'm slowly getting used to Ubuntu; for I've been a Windows user as long as I've used any computer. I'm hoping someone can suggest a good graphics software.

I'm simply looking for one that works close to Microsoft Paint. (Paint brush functionality, simple paint operations, etc)
Does Ubuntu offer anything like it?

ProgrammerInProgress
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James Litewski
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    @Lucio That question is asking for editors that don't have tools like brush, pencil, erase, and so forth, and which are in effect mainly image viewers, with minimal editing functions like changing the image's orientation. This is quite different. – Eliah Kagan Aug 18 '14 at 00:22
  • In my opinion, the other question address the requirements for a MS Paint similar app. Look at the accepted answers of both questions, they recommend the same app! But, as you say, someone might look for a different point of view. It is pretty tiny and subjective the difference here. – Lucio Aug 18 '14 at 00:27
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    Shouldn't the other question be closed instead, if any? This question is older and more popular. – Pavel V. May 01 '15 at 09:25
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    This is not a duplicate. The current top answer may be Pinta for both questions, but that's because Pinta is a very versatile piece of software. The OP's intention is very different in the "duplicate" question. – dinosaur Jul 16 '16 at 06:00
  • I agree this is not a duplicate. And neither question should be closed - they definitely are different questions, not duplicates.. This one is looking for a simple application to do simple paint operations. I use Gimp, and I use Paint and they each serve very different cases. – Peter Kelley Feb 04 '22 at 18:41

7 Answers7

367

The closest MS Paint clone is Pinta. I regard it as vastly superior to MS Paint, but it retains its simplicity.

enter image description here

Install via the software center

Edit

On latest Ubuntu, you have to update permissions to avoid crash.enter image description here

  1. Launch permission window from Software.
  2. Enable the last permission "Read/Write files on removable storage devices."
DevLoverUmar
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fossfreedom
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    +1 for Pinta, for newbies to linux its a better alternative than Gimp – Chakra Apr 23 '11 at 09:59
  • +1 And it's modeled after Paint.NET! (And I've heard of it, too!) – Mateen Ulhaq Apr 23 '11 at 18:25
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    +1, did what I wanted. Good screenshot btw - immediately tells you if this program is what you're looking for. – Jonik Jun 15 '11 at 09:28
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    Does the ONE thing I can't do on GIMP... Make a stupid rectangle for censoring names (when I wanna post an auto-correct, etc) – pgrytdal Dec 08 '12 at 22:09
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    @pgrytdal, you can draw rectangles on GIMP. I don't think it's as intuitive as it should, but this is how I do it: http://pbs01.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/145/ – Waldir Leoncio Aug 21 '13 at 02:45
  • Thank god that you did not mention GIMP. I was looking exactly for an intuitive tool like Pinta. :-) – Benny Code Sep 24 '13 at 12:41
  • For me Pinta is much better than kolourpaint, xpaint and Gimp. It is easier, more intuitive and quite advanced. – Yevgeniy Afanasyev May 27 '15 at 23:52
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    +1 for Pinta. I'm a longtime MS Paint user. Struggled with both Gimp and ImageMagick on Ubuntu. I just installed Pinta. Took 5 minutes to install on Ubuntu 14.04 (sudo apt-get install pinta) and 5 minutes to figure out how to use. So far I've used it to copy, paste, erase, select colors, fill regions with color, and to draw rectangles, lines, ellipses and text. – Steve Saporta Feb 09 '16 at 21:40
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    It nearly dies on high resolution images. – Imaskar Oct 11 '16 at 07:16
  • text color is white and is not seen in white background, how to change text color? – bit_scientist May 08 '17 at 09:11
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    Be careful, in pinta version before 1.5 (my ubuntu installed 1.3 by default) copy&paste is seriously bugged: for zoomed-in image the pasted rectangle appears off screen (in the corner of the image, not the screen). You have to add the pinta ppa manually to get newest stable version. That's the most important paint feature for me, so I nearly gave up pinta! (but the alternatives are not better :)) – Ilja May 13 '17 at 13:11
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    Pinta is too slow compared to good old Microsoft Paint. – abg Dec 26 '17 at 14:14
  • I've always used KorourPaint. It has all the functionality of MS Paint, with some functionality that I'd always missed having in MS Paint, like being able to insert text at any zoom level. But it's simple and basic like MS Paint, and has the look and feel of MS Paint. – Rafael_Espericueta Mar 31 '18 at 17:07
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    WARN! Doesn't work with Ubuntu 16.04, after start select area app is freezing and crash. – deivan_ May 31 '18 at 18:46
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    Not works with Ubuntu 18.04 - crashes when start image editing – P_M Dec 21 '18 at 10:12
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    Pinta is awful. Try drawing a filled rectangle in two clicks. Let me know how it goes. – breakpoint May 29 '19 at 00:12
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    Also, the performance problems that were a little bit concerning in HD cause serious problems in 4K. – breakpoint May 29 '19 at 00:12
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    In my little experience with pinta, It has no way to print/print preview file – humble_wolf Jun 14 '19 at 17:02
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    Pinta is nowhere near a replacement for Paint. In addition to the other complaints here, here's another example: you can't even select a part of the image and resize it. You literally cannot resize a selection. There's been a push request since 2015. It's downright inaccurate to claim that Pinta is an MS Clone, much less that it's superior. – Marses Jul 25 '19 at 09:54
  • I don't see edge smoothing and easy handling of transparency which are two of my key requirements. Nice with the layers and the overall simplicity. – Stein Åsmul Oct 23 '19 at 19:29
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    Pinta seems to constantly crash for me before I have even been able to make one edit to the image I open (I'm using Ubuntu Mate 18.04 LTS). – HelloGoodbye Oct 29 '19 at 17:45
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    beware, Pinta depends on mono which is kinda big dependency for such a simple task. I chose mtPaint as it is more lightweight – törzsmókus Mar 03 '20 at 09:12
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    not like MS Paint and too complicated. – java-addict301 Aug 30 '20 at 05:31
  • This is ridiculous, it doesn't even show the image and selection size... – goulashsoup Apr 28 '22 at 09:52
  • I found Pinta buggy and too complicated. Gimp is far superior if I want a complicated editor. – John May 06 '23 at 12:55
  • it mostly crashes in Ubuntu 22.04 – Benyamin Jafari Jan 09 '24 at 12:14
64

For a basic MS Paint clone I would also suggest xpaint and kolourpaint. Both are available on the Software Centre.

xpaint: xpaint

kolourpaint: kolourpaint

Jay Sullivan
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user14854
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    Kolorpaint is the most MS-Paint-like one I've found. – Andrew Lambert Apr 23 '11 at 17:02
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    But its meant for KDE, right? Meaning tons of libraries downloaded in vanilla Ubuntu? – MestreLion Jun 07 '11 at 12:49
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    +1 for Kolorpaint. Too bad it drags with it a million KDE dependencies. – Gabriel May 24 '15 at 15:39
  • Sadly, xpaint looks nice but is absurd: Things which are best done with keyboard are implemented mouse only. Things which are best implemented with mouse are keyboard only. Undo is very limited (why?). Magnifier is modal (wtf?). Not WYSIWYG (WTF!?!) when adding shapes. etc. etc. etc. sigh. – Tino Jan 21 '16 at 00:55
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    +1 for kolourpaint, too. Easy to use, does the job, WYSIWYG, etc. No quirks found yet. – Tino Jan 21 '16 at 00:59
  • Great product and simple, MS Paint replacement. To install, use sudo apt-get install kolourpaint4 – Gabriel Staples Jun 10 '16 at 02:09
  • @Tino xpaint is very old... it existed in the 80s. (probably not that version, but X-Windows came with an xpaint tool for a long time.) – Alexis Wilke Mar 15 '18 at 23:49
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    +1 for KolourPaint! The first software I've tried that can do the extremely basic operations of selecting, moving a selection, deleting a selection and drawing lines properly and intuitively. – HelloGoodbye Oct 29 '19 at 18:24
  • For some reason, though, KolourPaint messes up the color when you try to draw lines of thickness 1, and the lines becomes semitransparent. So either you have to draw thicker lines in order to make them get the correct color, or you have to use the fill tool and correct the color of the line after you have drawn it. Why?? Why can't there just be some program that can manage all the basic functions that exists in MS Paint without trying to be smart and as a consequence mess up some basic functionality? Sigh. (continued below) – HelloGoodbye Oct 29 '19 at 18:50
  • KolourPaint is still the best simple drawing tool that I've tried, but I don't understand why it should be so difficult to make a good MS Paint clone. – HelloGoodbye Oct 29 '19 at 18:50
  • this is the correct answer! – java-addict301 Jul 14 '22 at 15:22
  • xpaint looks good, except for the lack of Undo. – RonJohn Mar 29 '23 at 03:53
  • +1 for kolourpaint too. There's a slightly different mindset wrt filling a shape but it's pretty intuitive and sensible. I like avoiding the complications of a fancy editor like Gimp for quick editing. – John May 06 '23 at 13:02
  • I'm using KolourPaint too. It's just straightforward in cases where I want to just highlight parts of a screenshot for example. – LeoRado Feb 02 '24 at 13:01
  • KolourPaint is the correct answer. It is lightweight and behaves extremely similar to MS-Paint from like 25 years ago. MS-Paint has it's place, as does GIMP or xpaint. They are different tools with different purposes. – Daniel L. VanDenBosch Mar 28 '24 at 14:13
52

There is also Gnome Paint.

Screenshot

Install via the software center

Jjed
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raylu
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mtPaint is a lightweight equivalent of Microsoft Paint. It is lighter (requires only 1 MB to install because it depends on GTK which Ubuntu has out-of-the-box) than Pinta, which needs 20 MB disc space on a standard Ubuntu install because of the Mono dependency.

mtPaint is documented, unlike Pinta: mtPaint handbook

Janus Troelsen
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O C
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Ubuntu has GIMP in the default repositories. GIMP is far more powerful than Paint, but you needn't use all of its functions.

To install GIMP in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu open the terminal and type:

sudo apt install gimp

You just need an good introduction. At Meet the Gimp there are many, many comfortable video tutorials. It isn't easy to not get lost in the big number of options with gimp, but sooner or later you need more, than some simple program is offering, so it might be easier to learn one program in depth than first an easy one, and then the more complicated one too.

karel
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user unknown
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    I find GIMP to be incredible hard to use if one wants only to draw shapes. – Georg Schölly Apr 23 '11 at 09:28
  • You're right, Georg: Gimp isn't easy. So I added a link to a collection of online-video tutorials to gimp. – user unknown Apr 23 '11 at 14:03
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    Give it a try to start the gimp from the command line with --no-splash --no-data (and maybe some other option). Then it starts up faster (not the very first time, though), the GUI is less cluttered and it looks like a simple paint program. – knb Apr 23 '11 at 18:57
  • Which gimp version do you need for that? With 2.6.8 I have nearly the same or the same UI, just the splash animation is missing. – user unknown Apr 23 '11 at 23:04
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    You will need a weekend or so to get familiar with Gimp. It is not like Paint. – kiltek Jan 06 '17 at 09:29
  • GIMP is great for highly complex modifications but this also overcomplicates its usage. For example, I don't need layers, and I just want a simple click-and drag copy/paste and resizing of the canvas. This is where a program like KolourPaint is amazing almost identical to MS-Paint. – MasterHD Mar 20 '17 at 11:27
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    Any paint program that requires a video tutorial TO DRAW A FILLED RECTANGLE has failed. – breakpoint May 29 '19 at 00:13
  • @breakpoint: You can draw filled rectangles with LibreOfficeCalc, LibreOfficeWriter, gnuplot and many more. Most easy for that task is Inkscape, which is a vector drawing program and therefore not at all similar to Paint. But for using Inkscape, you need to understand the difference and its importance between objects and paths - if you get it, most things are easy to learn and understand. I guess in Gimp, which I don't know much about, there are basic principles to understand as well, which make the beginning hard. – user unknown May 29 '19 at 09:24
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    Well, one problem for me, for example, is that there is a really important basic use case I need a DIRT SIMPLE solution for: redacting confidential data from screenshots before filing bug reports. People aren't going to bother unless I can show them how to do it in a VERY short number of steps. And all of these programs fail to do what you can, sadly, literally do in two steps in Microsoft Paint. – breakpoint Jun 01 '19 at 08:33
  • @breakpoint: It's a no brainer, if you use Inkscape. – user unknown Jun 01 '19 at 08:47
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    @breakpoint I think the issue is rather that GIMP is not a paint program but rather a kind of PhotoShop alternative. I agree that it should not be recommended as a “program like MS Paint” because it is not. – törzsmókus Mar 03 '20 at 09:10
  • Gimp is large and boots slowly. Definitely too heavy weight for simple tasks. – Moberg Nov 09 '23 at 17:59
  • @Moberg When did you try the last time? It starts on my machine with a cheap and not that recent SSD in about 2 to 3 seconds. If you have to install your simple Graphics programm, first … - Gimp is very often installed by default. – user unknown Nov 09 '23 at 20:17
  • @userunknown today, I don't want a several second load. – Moberg Nov 09 '23 at 21:10
  • gimp is a fine tool, but it is not a simple paint program. – Daniel L. VanDenBosch Mar 28 '24 at 14:09
  • @DanielL.VanDenBosch: I'm well aware, but what is your recommendation? Given, that I think that there isn't an equivalent for Paint, I made my recommendation and offered my rationale. What is your suggestion? – user unknown Mar 30 '24 at 10:30
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Look at shutter, the feature rich screenshot tool. In Microsoft App terms, it is actually a combination of the snipping tool and ms paint.

It captures screenshots, but it also has an edit mode for the screenshots (or some file you can load from your hard drive) with some basic drawing tools, which are well thought-out and quite usable for inserting arrows and numbers into images, cropping, etc. Things you do to images to cut +paste them into presentations, after editing.

Update 2021: These days, I would install Shutter from Snapcraft

knb
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  • Shutter has very nice features like cropping, annotation with text, arrows and shapes as well as blurring. Perfect for screenshots and also good for other purposes. – Martin Ueding Jun 07 '11 at 17:57
  • I've used shutter a lot for screenshotting, it's great for that, but it's not much like MsPaint when it comes to quick and simple drawing etc. – user985366 Nov 21 '18 at 17:16
  • snap info shutter: error: no snap found for "shutter" – Moberg Nov 09 '23 at 18:01
  • How to draw a rectangle? Seems to take many clicks. Also: how to export all of drawing to clipboard? – Moberg Nov 09 '23 at 18:04
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It isn't Paint exactly but I really like Inkscape. It is a vector graphics editor.

Maybe that is more than you want.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/

Its also in the repository

Xt8088
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    InkScape is definitely the easiest and most powerful graphics program I've used, specially for drawing shapes and editing them. However, with my tablet, I sometimes need to scribble text and a dot is not easy to create. For example, when writing freehand text, suppose I want to write a lowercase 'i', the dot won't be visible. But then again, there are alternatives to it and still InkScape is my first choice. – itsols Jan 18 '15 at 13:05
  • InkScape is very powerful tool, I have been using that a lot. – vasilakisfil Mar 10 '17 at 11:10
  • Inkscape, as a vector drawing tool, as you mentioned yourself, is not 'not exactly Paint' - it's nearly as far from it, as a graphics program can be. The name isn't similar, the license isn't, the file formats aren't. – user unknown Nov 09 '23 at 20:23