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MS Paint is here to stay

blogs.windows.com

81–90 of 320 posts

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a good thing that Microsoft is reducing the size of their base OS and decoupling many of the apps from the Windows release cycle. It definitely does, however, feel like the end of a era.

Hopefully they continue by removing: Candy Crush, "Get Office", Minecraft, ... and all other trash that gets installed by default.

When that "Get Office" thing first popped-up, I was sure my PC was infected with malware and came to the brink of formatting my hard drive.

Later came the random console pop-up from the automatic WSL updates [1] and then I did panic enough to actually format all the things but that's another story.

[1]: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/841

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think so. That also means that for shared or strictly managed computers, it won't be installed or installable. No more screenshots on the hospital PC, then.

Shift-WindowsKey+S is the new screen snipping tool. Built right into the OS.

Huh. I just tried it. A snipping interface came up and let me select a rectangle of the screen. Then, none of the following things happened:

- A message telling me where the picture went.

- The picture showing up on the desktop.

- The picture showing up in "Documents".

- The picture showing up in "Pictures".

But, I was able to recover the screenshot by... opening Paint, and pasting from the clipboard! That's not a solution that will be available on a machine without Paint.

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#83
post #11

What is, and has been great about MS Paint is that no matter what Windows machine I have been on, I know that I have had it available. No matter if it's my old grandma's computer, if I have needed to quickly do something simple with an image, MS Paint has always been there for me. Now that will no longer be the case. If I have to download and install it on the computer before I use it, then what is the point? It will…

>What is, and has been great about MS Paint is that no matter what Windows machine I have been on, I know that I have had it available. Completely agreed. This is basically Microsoft officially confirming that yes, MSPaint will be gone from Windows. Seems kind of senseless.

just use paint 3d, I just tried it out, seems a simple enough replacement for most simple editing tasks

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will still be a Paint on every Windows machine, it's just Paint 3D instead of MS Paint from now on. And yes, Paint 3D allows to manipulate 2D images as MS Paint did.

Yeah it's funny. Had they branded this ordeal "Paint gets an upgrade" instead of "Paint gets replaced" nobody would care.

That was how it was branded—Paint 3D replaced mspaint.exe and it was positioned as an upgrade (Paint → Paint 3D). But there was substantial backlash when Paint 3D didn’t do all that mspaint.exe had done, and Microsoft caved to pressure and put mspaint.exe back a build or two later.

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#85
post #11

What is, and has been great about MS Paint is that no matter what Windows machine I have been on, I know that I have had it available. No matter if it's my old grandma's computer, if I have needed to quickly do something simple with an image, MS Paint has always been there for me. Now that will no longer be the case. If I have to download and install it on the computer before I use it, then what is the point? It will…

They could do what Apple does with Java: provide a stub tool that, when run, asks permission to download and install the real thing. That streamlines the "download and install" process.

For Paint, I'm not sure that would be a big win, disk space-wise. mspaint.exe is around 6.5 MB on my system, but it may need additional files. However, they could do the same for Notepad (which probably isn't on the firing line yet because quite a few installers and updaters launch it by hard-coded path if users want to read release notes) and a few other tools and share the code for asking permission between those.

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#86
post #11

What is, and has been great about MS Paint is that no matter what Windows machine I have been on, I know that I have had it available. No matter if it's my old grandma's computer, if I have needed to quickly do something simple with an image, MS Paint has always been there for me. Now that will no longer be the case. If I have to download and install it on the computer before I use it, then what is the point? It will…

More pertinently, what happens when your grandma searches for "MS Paint" in the Store, other than needing an account? We all know the store is mostly trash and I have no doubt that people pushing their trash will leap on this chance to flood the search results for relevant keywords.

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a good thing that Microsoft is reducing the size of their base OS and decoupling many of the apps from the Windows release cycle. It definitely does, however, feel like the end of a era.

Hopefully they continue by removing: Candy Crush, "Get Office", Minecraft, ... and all other trash that gets installed by default.

...the integrated advertising platform, cloud software, the mandatory spying components...

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#88
I find the title very contradictory to the article. It's going to "stay", but in the Windows Store (so you have to download), and with very subtle words they say that it's not going to get any updates. So, no Microsoft, you're saying it's going to go more than you're saying it's going to stay.

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#89
post #80

I just want to take a moment to rant about what an awful user experience Paint 3D was for me. I was using Windows for a short while because graphics under Linux weren't working well (GPU was new at the time, it took a couple of months for it to become reliable enough to use as a daily driver under Linux), and installed the Creator's update, which setup Paint 3D as the default program for every image file it could rec…

lots of people raging..... about resizing and cropping.... So I figure I'd have a go I haven't used Paint 3d before until a few moments ago, and very quickly worked out how to resize and crop an image. Seemed simple enough. The image resizing is actually better than most I've seen.

It's not so much that I couldn't have figured it out (though I seem to recall it was not immediately obvious how to do anything, to me), rather it changed my selected applications. I'd set it up the way I liked it, with software I was familiar with and happy with...and an OS update removed that configuration and pointed to Paint 3D instead, an application I hadn't asked for, and seemingly could not uninstall (at least, I couldn't figure out how to uninstall it using the normal process for uninstalling applications).

I should be clear: I don't know Windows. I've used it very rarely over the past couple of decades. I keep a Windows partition around for gaming and audio work (though even that no longer really requires Windows these days, as my favorite games are on Linux and even audio isn't awful under Linux anymore). So, if someone knows their way around Windows, my complaints might seem sort of stupid. Maybe it's trivial to fix all of the annoyances I had; but they were frustrating for me. For me, there was just mysterious stuff happening on my machine and I didn't know how to fix it and I didn't like it.

Re: MS Paint is here to stay

#90
With GPU passthrough becoming quite usable I don't think I'll ever put windows on bare metal again. And in my VMs I'll just be using evaluation copies.

I left MS office for open/libreoffice a few years ago and haven't looked back. The idea of having a store built into my operating system makes me ill, I already have enough of that with android. I can't really imagine giving MS any more money (except possibly when buying a laptop), and I'm not sure what they can do to change it.

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