Install Impasto on Linux

Impasto needs GTK 4.18 or newer, which is what decides which of the three Linux builds will start on your distribution. All three are on the releases page.

If you are unsure which to take, take the Flatpak. It carries its own GTK and therefore works on the widest range of distributions.

Flatpak

The Flatpak is published under the app id com.github.zbcoding.Impasto and distributed through FlatPark, not Flathub. Open the FlatPark page and use its install instructions.

To install the release file directly instead, download Impasto-x86_64.flatpak from the releases page and run:

flatpak install ./Impasto-x86_64.flatpak

Then start Impasto from your application menu, or with flatpak run com.github.zbcoding.Impasto. Updates via FlatPark arrive with flatpak update.

The Flatpak is fully self-contained: it bundles the .NET runtime it needs, so no extra runtime extension has to be installed.

AppImage

The AppImage is a single file you run directly. It bundles GTK, so it does not need GTK installed on your system - but it does inherit the glibc version of the machine that built it, which is reported as glibc 2.43 on every release. That is the floor for the whole image:

• Works: Ubuntu 26.04, Fedora 44, Arch, and anything newer.
• Does not work: Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 43, Debian 13. Take the Flatpak on those.

Download Impasto-x86_64.AppImage, then:

chmod +x Impasto-x86_64.AppImage
./Impasto-x86_64.AppImage

If it fails to start with an error about FUSE, your system has no libfuse2. Either install it, or run the image without mounting it:

./Impasto-x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run

The AppImage does not install desktop entries or icons; it is the one to use when you want a single file to try or to carry around.

Zip

Impasto-linux-dotnet-10.0.x.zip is the plain build. It does not bundle GTK, so it uses the GTK your distribution provides and needs GTK 4.18 or newer with libadwaita 1.8 or newer already installed.

unzip Impasto-linux-dotnet-10.0.x.zip -d impasto
cd impasto
./Impasto

On a distribution older than that, or one whose GTK is older, the application fails at startup with a missing-symbol error. Either update GTK, or use the Flatpak or AppImage instead, which package their own.

Building from source

Impasto builds with the .NET 10 SDK. On a Debian-based distribution:

sudo apt install autotools-dev autoconf-archive gettext intltool libadwaita-1-dev
git clone https://github.com/zbcoding/ImpastoPaint
cd ImpastoPaint
dotnet build
dotnet run --project Impasto

Optional dependency: webp-pixbuf-loader, which lets the system image loader decode WebP files.

To install it system-wide through the Autotools recipe:

./autogen.sh          # ./configure instead, if you are building from a release tarball
make install          # add --prefix=<dir> to ./configure to install somewhere other than /usr/local

Uninstalling

• Flatpak: flatpak uninstall com.github.zbcoding.Impasto
• AppImage or zip: delete the file or the folder you unpacked it into. Settings and recent files stay in ~/.config/Impasto; delete that too if you want a clean slate.