I tried it out, and it's a pretty good clone. It serves my muscle memory well, with a few hiccups like drag-and-drop image onto the window doesn't work exactly the same, the save menu is a bit different. But there are also some pretty good improvements, like the addition of text layers (text got rasterized immediately after loosing focus in paint.NET which made it HORRIBLE to work with. This change is super welcome). There are also a bunch of new "plus" menu items that it seemingly gets from PhotoCraft? Not sure if that's because I have PhotoCraft installed, or if it comes with those features bundled. I'm not sure how good this is, because Paint.NET menus were already quite bloated and confusing to navigate, so this makes them even more cluttered with for example "Hue / Saturation" next to "Hue / Saturation +". The UI windows can't be dragged out of the paint.rs window like they could in Paint.NET. I think this is also faster than Paint.NET was.

I like this, it's quite good. I would like a more modern UI though, ideally using native GTK elements. Though that raises and interesting question of how much should a re-implementation veer away from the original. I think I'll keep this as a backup if I get fed up with PhotoCraft.