Pinta installation on Windows 11 with WSL2 openSUSE-Tumbleweed Guide

[ryan-de-boer]

These steps are how to install Pinta from source on WSL with openSUSE-Tumbleweed Linux distro. I chose openSUSE-Tumbleweed because Gemini said it was good for handling latest GTK4 libraries (related to errors I had on Ubuntu, I didn't want them to happen again). Your steps might be slightly different depending on which version of WSL you have. Claude and ChatGPT helped me work out some of the steps.

Installing Tumbleweed

• Run powershell as Administrator
• Type "wsl --list --online" to see the list of valid distributions. We will be using "openSUSE-Tumbleweed".
• "wsl --install openSUSE-Tumbleweed --web-download". If it says you need to reboot, you may need to reboot and try again.
• The interactive installation should show. Press enter to start, enter on us keyboard, continue on license agreement, choose time zone, enter a root password and confirm, enter Username, Full name, Password etc, wait for applying firstboot settings.

Installing dependencies

• Now you should be in the distro
• "cd ~" Prefer storing files on the Linux filesystem because its faster.
• Git:
  sudo zypper refresh
  sudo zypper install git
  git --version
• "git clone https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta.git"

sudo zypper install tar
tar --version

sudo zypper install gzip
gzip --version

wget https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh -O dotnet-install.sh
chmod +x dotnet-install.sh
./dotnet-install.sh -c 8.0 --install-dir ~/.dotnet

echo 'export PATH=$HOME/.dotnet:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

sudo zypper install libicu

dotnet --version

Building

• "cd Pinta"
  dotnet build -c Release

Installing gtk4

sudo zypper install gtk4
sudo zypper install gtk4-devel
sudo zypper install libadwaita libadwaita-devel
sudo zypper install libpango-1_0-0 libcairo2
pkg-config --modversion gtk4

Expect: 4.20.3 or newer

Setting env vars

echo 'export LANG=en_US.UTF-8' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(dbus-launch --sh-syntax)"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export GTK_A11Y=none' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export GDK_BACKEND=x11' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export GSK_RENDERER=gl' >> ~/.bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

Adding fonts that Pinta uses

sudo zypper install pango pango-devel
sudo zypper install liberation-fonts liberation-mono-fonts
sudo zypper install google-noto-fonts

Fixing image loaders

To fix saving as eg png:

Install loaders

sudo zypper install gdk-pixbuf-loader-rsvg

Rebuild loader cache

sudo gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders-64 --update-cache

Verify loaders

gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders-64

And when it all works:

dotnet run --project Pinta

Video: Pinta on Windows 11 with WSL2 openSUSE-Tumbleweed
Shows using Pinta and loading a custom extension and shows its features.
https://github.com/ryan-de-boer/ryan-de-boer.github.io/raw/refs/heads/main/2026-03-14%2008-42-27%20Pinta%20Tumbleweed.mp4