In PaintDotNet and Photoshop, there's a slider bar (from 0% to 100%) for "hardness" on the brush tool. Adjusting this setting makes the edges of the brush tool fade towards alpha transparency. For digital art this is one of the most useful things for shading a picture, manually adding a bit of shadow and lighting, and so on.

A setting to this effect would be excellent in Pinta, since for Linux users (I've recently been trying out Linux Mint) installing PaintDotNet on WINE barely works (and only with very old versions that didn't even have this feature, which they added over 5 years ago), and Photoshop has it's own issues (high price/piracy, etc). A brush hardness/soft brush option in Pinta would be the only thing still needed, in my opinion, to it being a worthy alternative to either of those programs.

(If this feature is already in Pinta, I apologize; I did check around in 1.7 but I can't seem to find it anywhere. If it is in there, it's hard to find- I'd expect it to be located somewhere to the right of the Brush Size setting.)

In any case, I appreciate the hard work that goes into developing software, and wish the developers luck in their future coding and compiling. Thanks!