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Microsoft Paint has been marked for death:
The era of Microsoft Paint appears to be coming to an end with the upcoming release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. The image-editing application is officially being classified by Microsoft as a "deprecated feature," as noted by The Guardian. That means that, come this fall, Paint will "not be in active development and might be removed in future releases."
I go hard in the paint.
Also at PCWorld and Smithsonian.
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After 32 Years, the Death of Microsoft Paint
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I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
-- Arlo Guthrie
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:01AM (31 children)
Enquiring minds want to know
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 5, Informative) by mhajicek on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:06AM
Paint.net
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:15AM (4 children)
I'm not using the abomination that is win10 but I've been using paintshop pro 7 for around 17 years now, works like a charm in win7 and doesn't depend on any bloated frameworks and whatnot.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:17AM (1 child)
Indeed... The Corel stuff has always been my favorite, for sure....
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday July 26 2017, @02:48AM
Corel PhotoPaint here, v8 (1998!) by preference but whatever version comes to hand will do... its ease of use has ruined me for anything else. IIRC this version dates from back before Corel acquired PSP (and fixed its increasingly-sluggish filter browser).
I used PCPaintbrush back in the day (I think it's the oldest graphical app I have, dated 1985) and old reliable MSPaint still finds the odd use or two as well -- dumb as rocks but even so, sometimes it's just handy.
But as to current topic -- Paint doesn't eat much and requires no maintenance (at least if they'd leave well enough alone!) -- why kill it off unless it's meant to force everyone into something we don't want, or buying an app from the Windows Store? what exactly are locked-down environments supposed to do??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by BenFenner on Tuesday July 25 2017, @02:46PM (1 child)
Same here. I've been using PaintShop Pro 6 since the late 1990s with wild success. I does all my light lifting, and most of my heavy lifting. The only limitation I've ever run into is that is doesn't handle modern transparent PNGs very well. And now that other apps have content-aware-fill, I've found that I sometimes wish I had that. For transparent PNGs, I use GIMP. For photography exposure/lighting/contrast/color changes I will use Raw Therapy. For panoramas (including content-aware-fill) I use Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Wednesday July 26 2017, @02:53AM
I hadn't heard of ICE, it looks really useful. Thanks!
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/image-composite-editor/# [microsoft.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by richtopia on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:31AM (3 children)
There is no alternative.
Really there isn't. I work on inspection equipment which perform image processing, and some times the customer needs to do something very custom. I can write a tutorial in Paint and know it is installed on their computer. If I tell them to go to some website and install open source software some customers have to call IT. For counting pixels from the center of an image you really don't need anything else.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:53AM
You... what? Have you tried writing the tutorial in a text editor?
Really, it's sooo much easier to align text lines, take care of the page size and whatnot than it is embedding text in rasters.
You can even try to format the tutorial as an HTML page or set of pages.
(grin... a large trollish one...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @07:33AM
Try PaintShop Pro. Even the old freeware versions are better than Paint or or that infuriating kludgefest Gimp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @02:03AM
My guess is that you can push the problem off for a few more years by snagging an older copy of Paint and installing that on the new "Paint-less" version of Windows. Maybe even include this with your software distribution so that customer IT is only called once when your stuff is installed.
Win 7 didn't come with the original Windows Solitaire and the other simple card games. Sol.exe (plus cards.dll) that I grabbed from a WinXP system works fine.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:55AM (10 children)
GIMP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @05:52AM
Right. That would work very well when giving people instructions, especially in corporate environments :)
A: "OK, first install GIMP..."
B: "I'm reporting you to HR for harassment!"
(I personally prefer Krita. I could never get used to the GIMP interface...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @07:35AM (8 children)
Gimp sucks, not because of the features but b/c the UI is an abomination and the default save formats are pure shite.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday July 25 2017, @07:39AM (4 children)
The UI has improved a lot in newer versions, and any other quirks don't matter much after you've used it for years.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @08:08AM (3 children)
It's still GTK.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 25 2017, @08:18AM (2 children)
They call it GTK+ [wikipedia.org] and it's so good that non-GIMP applications use it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday July 25 2017, @05:00PM (1 child)
No, it's a pile of shit that's poorly documented and constantly changing according to the whims of the Gnome devs. Many projects have switched to Qt as a result, including LXDE (now LXQt).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @11:11PM
Finally someone that gets it.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday July 25 2017, @02:31PM
There's a difference between saving the project and exporting an image. Are you sure you're complaining about the project save format?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 25 2017, @05:03PM (1 child)
Default formats?? That's not how GIMP works. "Save" saves the project in its native format, like Audacity and a lot of other programs. To save as a different format you use "export". It saves in every graphics format I've ever of except GIF, and you choose the format when naming it. Yes, the default is PNG, but just type the file name with the extension .jpg and it saves it as JPG. PDF saves it as PDF, etc. simple, logical, and elegant (unlike their menu structure which is confusing at first).
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday July 26 2017, @12:58AM
Fortunately, you don't need to jump through that hoop [github.com] unless you want to.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by radu on Tuesday July 25 2017, @06:58AM (2 children)
Use case: take 2 screenshots, cut a portion of each, paste together as a new image; draw an arrow pointing to something, perhaps add 2 words besides that. Paint does that easily. I searched a lot for a Paint-alternative for Linux and eventually found this (available for Windows too, I haven't tried it though):
https://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/ [pinta-project.com]
No GIMP/Krita bloat for just that use case which covers 99% of all I ever need of "image manipulation".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @01:49PM
(Score: 2) by Hyper on Tuesday July 25 2017, @02:10PM
Try Kolourpaint4 [debian.org].
It has similar features to mspaint.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 25 2017, @07:00AM
Ubuntu :)
But seriously, it depends on what you needed it for. For actual editing work, I use Photoshop CS5 which I'm fairly good with. MS Paint is very good at screen capture manipulation where I can paste, crop, and save very fast. If I need to make some notation, a scribbled arrow or some text is sufficient. The small number of tools makes it like a Swiss Army knife. I know there are plenty of screen capture utilities out there, but MS Paint is guaranteed to be there.
I doubt there is any alternative that is as lightweight as MS Paint.
Of course this is Windows 10. Just ask Cortana to take you to paint.net
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 25 2017, @07:41AM (1 child)
Paint.NET for a Windows paint replacement, GIMP for ghetto photoshop work.
I have used Inkscape (SVG editor/paint) in the past but I found it to be a mess. Maybe it has improved.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @08:19AM
If you used Inkscape as replacement for paint, you certainly were disappointed, because it isn't and isn't meant to be that.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday July 25 2017, @01:04PM
DPaint III on my Amiga.
...or The GIMP.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:54PM (2 children)
GIMP. What else? I'm not paying a thousand bucks for Photoshop, and only idiots pirate software. Running pirated software is begging to be pwned.
The only problem I've had with GIMP was its pitiful text handling, and I have an excellent solution [mcgrew.info] to that shortcoming.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 25 2017, @05:13PM (1 child)
From the linked page:
Strange. I see all the installed fonts in Gimp (just checked). Maybe it's a problem only of the Windows version (I'm using Linux), or a problem only of earlier versions (I've got 2.8.10), or a problem with your specific installation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 26 2017, @03:50PM
I'd have to look to see what version I'm running, but using native fonts in Linux and not Windows is logical, especially since many Windows fonts may have trademark, copyright, patent, or other baggage that open source is free of. Strange, though, because both Open Office and Libre Office use Windows fonts.
Lulu's cover designer has the same "few fonts" problem, but fortunately I don't need their fonts except on the book's spine.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org