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 be faster to just google "MS paint online free" and click the first link.
This thread shows clearly the negativity around everything Microsoft does, especially if you compare to other technology companies. Apple deprecates some API or removes a feature? "It's the future, you have to adapt, etc" Microsoft deprecates a toy program made 25 years ago, but still offers the option of downloading it for free? "How dare they, I want it in the base install, etc"
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.
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 recognize. Paint 3D is a joke for all the image stuff I want to do; cropping, resizing, highlighting, mostly, and the user interface was pretty confusing all around.<p>And, I couldn't figure out how to uninstall it! It wasn't uninstallable in the normal ways, and I don't think I ever figured out how to do so.<p>I won't miss Paint, and I never used it, but I definitely don't consider Paint 3D an upgrade or improvement. And, I really hate Microsoft's standard practice of replacing file associations even if I've already setup my own before one of their apps gets installed (I had a couple of other tools setup for images, and they got replaced in the defaults for like 30 file types). They do it with pretty much every app they distribute. It's presumptuous.
That's a clickbait title if I ever saw one. It seems Microsoft is trying to force uwp apps down our throats. It is sad because classic programs systematically feels snappier and are more efficient. They show their age, but are definitely less annoying than their sexier windows 10 version.<p>I don't know how many time I tried =really tried= to use the photo app or the new remote desktop app, but I always come back very frustrated to the classic version.
One more thing pushing me to interface with an online store. One less reason for picking Windows for my "toolbench" computer.<p>The paranoid in me is expecting there to be a catch to this new paint application. Ads? DLC?
Okay so when I first heard this, I was kind of enraged, because I use paint daily for screenshots, ad-hoc cropping and stuff.<p>And when I tried Paint3D in the past it was garbage. Someone in this thread said that it is actually easy to crop with it, and I tried again, and yes it is actually a bearable experience, but scaling the image gives a crappy quality, so it is a no-go.<p>Then I got the Win+Shift+S screen clipping tool, which is awesome, it only gets the clipped screenshot into the clipboard, which is a half-assed solution, but then I remembered I got evernote, and made Win+Shift+D save the clipboard into a new note.<p>This way I can instantly take a screenshot in an already cropped way, and save it for future use, and Evernote can easily Annotate the image with text, or arrows, which is sufficient.<p>Awesomeness!
An excellent example on how to generate media buzz. You would have to pay a decent amount of money if you wanted to achieve something similar with ads.
There are much better free [web based] alternatives for WordPad, Paint and Notepad these days and I prefer to use those over these obsolete applications. These are not useful applications, we just like them because of nostalgia.<p>I doubt if Microsoft is removing Paint because of OS base image size. It should be more about source code maintenance and UI consistency. Both WordPad and Paint got ribbon user interface for Windows 7 and calc.exe has been replace by a modern Windows Store app in Windows 10.<p>Why should Microsoft spend time and resource to keep these applications up to date while majority of users are using better free alternatives?
Disappointing comments in this thread. Lots of worthless complaining, and scant technical talk on solutions to this barely significant 'problem'.<p>If you want to keep the original mspaint.exe and don't want to use the Store for some reason, you can literally just copy it from any Windows 10 install media prior to RS3. Or from a running system. It's not difficult.
And here I was defending Microsoft in the other thread... This is much worse (for all the reasons people have already listed) than deprecating and eventually removing it which is what the original article implied was happening.
You absolutely need MS Paint on Windows.<p>For one thing, it provides workarounds for horrible stability and functionality issues with image printing out of the Windows Shell (Windows Explorer).<p>I think it provides the only way to print an image 1:1 (original scale) without installing third party software. I.e. 600 pixels of a 600 dpi image actually measure one inch. Not all images are photographs that can be scaled; sometimes they are patterns for some real-world object.<p>How would a Windows user, say, crop an image without MS Paint, using only a vanilla Windows install with no 3rd party anything?
The article really says,<p><i>We thought MS Paint was so great, we decided to list all the features that Paint 3D has that are similar to what MS Paint has. And we want to mention that Paint 3D is FREE!</i><p>These are the results for searching "MS Paint" on windows.com:<p><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/search/result.aspx?q=MS+Paint&search=&flt=AllSearch" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/search/result.aspx?q=MS+Pain...</a>
If they want to cut the bloat they can better look at fixing their installers. I don't need a copy of every installer ever used in my windows and program directories. Those folders are almost always the largest folders on my PC.
Im beginning to think that Microsoft's new strategy is to optimistically break all their products by adding the store front and telemetry to them. Neither of which are needed or wanted in the majority of cases.
If they really want to make their core / long time users happy they would release the "Old MSPaint" from windows 95 as a stand alone app
they should have found better way to go viral. I am not motivated to use paint3D. people using MSpaint are also be able to use MSexcel to paint.
It's been used not because microsoft produced minimal tool made huge impact! actually the other way around!
Where's the link? Specifically, how come this blog page doesn't link to the app in the app store?<p>Anyway, I agree that MS Paint needs to be built-in to Windows. It's like Notepad for images. Something that's reliable that we know that works and how to use.
So .. what? It always struck my as a toy program (kind of like how Notepad seems like a toy text editor).<p>When was the last time you could get anything done with MS Paint?
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.<p>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.