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Microsoft Software Windows

Microsoft Paint To Be Killed Off After 32 Years (theguardian.com) 388

Posted by msmash from the end-of-road dept.
Microsoft's next Windows 10 update, called the Fall Creators Update, will bring a variety of new features. But one long-standing stalwart of the Windows experience has been put on the chopping block: Microsoft Paint. From a report: First released with the very first version of Windows 1.0 in 1985, Paint in its various guises would be one of the first graphics editors used by many and became a core part of Windows. Starting life as a 1-bit monochrome licensed version of ZSoft's PC Paintbrush, it wasn't until Windows 98 that Paint could save in JPEG. With the Windows 10 Creators Update, released in April, Microsoft introduced the new Paint 3D, which is installed alongside traditional Paint and features 3D image making tools as well as some basic 2D image editing. But it is not an update to original Paint and doesn't behave like it. Now Microsoft has announced that, alongside Outlook Express, Reader app and Reading list, Microsoft Paint has been signalled for death having been added to the "features that are removed or deprecated in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update" list.
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Microsoft Paint To Be Killed Off After 32 Years More

Microsoft Paint To Be Killed Off After 32 Years

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  • NO! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quakeulf ( 2650167 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:02AM (#54866453)
    I still use it in a professional setting!

    YES, I AM DEAD SERIOUS.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by therealspacebug ( 4922543 )
      I also use it in work like once a week or so.
      Mostly to add arrows, circles or underlineing stuff etc to screenshots when making dokumentation.

    • Re:NO! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Scarred Intellect ( 1648867 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:12AM (#54866541) Homepage Journal
      paint.net [getpaint.net]
      • I prefer GIMP if I am to do more with an image than just show off something quickly.

        • I use and deeply love GIMP, but it is not an adequate replacement for MS Paint in a lot of use cases. Far too large and featureful when all you want to do is perform a single simple task.

    • Wow.

      Microsoft Paint was basically a workalike copy of the MacPaint, which was one of the free tools supplied with the original Apple Macintosh. MacPaint was dropped ages ago, though (the last version was 1988!)-- it was groundbreaking for its time, but basically primitive by any modern standards.

      • MacPaint was written for the Motorola 68000. MS Paint was written for x86. Sometimes you want a primitive tool. What do you use when you need a hammer?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by wed128 ( 722152 )

          A rock.

        • Re:NO! (Score:5, Funny)

          by sheramil ( 921315 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @10:18AM (#54867063)

          What do you use when you need a hammer?

          Ideally, it would manage your nail collection - it would search all available work-spaces for nails or nail-like objects - even http://dragonball.wikia.com/wi... [wikia.com] - and it would organise your nails according to size, weight, color, composition, shape and which end was pointy and which end wasn't. It would keep track of your nail usage and offer you the nails you use most frequently, even going online to order new nails of that type (or more likely new nails of whatever type is preferred by the hammer's manufacturer), or it might refuse to operate at all unless you had the correct proprietary nails. It would also have social media integration so you could check out what kinds of nails your friends were using as well as be exposed to advertisements for different sorts of nails, screws, bolts, rivets, glue, welding rods and Namekians.

          Oh, and it would also hammer nails, although that's kind of secondary at this point.

          • What do you use when you need a hammer?

            Ideally, it would manage your nail collection - it would search all available work-spaces for nails or nail-like objects - even http://dragonball.wikia.com/wi... [wikia.com] - and it would organise your nails according to size, weight, color, composition, shape and which end was pointy and which end wasn't. It would keep track of your nail usage and offer you the nails you use most frequently, even going online to order new nails of that type (or more likely new nails of whatever type is preferred by the hammer's manufacturer), or it might refuse to operate at all unless you had the correct proprietary nails. It would also have social media integration so you could check out what kinds of nails your friends were using as well as be exposed to advertisements for different sorts of nails, screws, bolts, rivets, glue, welding rods and Namekians.

            Oh, and it would also hammer nails, although that's kind of secondary at this point.

            Get that on kickstarter and I'll put in over 9,000.

          • After the fifth or sixth update, it would suddenly stop using generic nails and would only use proprietary nails from the hammer's manufacturer.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 )

          =What do you use when you need a hammer?

          A large wrench, side-on, works pretty well.

    • Re:NO! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:21AM (#54866623) Homepage Journal

      I don't like the way you can "buy" a product, and then the manufacturer remotely disables some of the functionality you paid for.

      Not upgrading is not a viable option, because you need security patches.

      • You can "upgrade" to Enterprise and then you can get security updates for the 1607 LTSB until 2026. Those same security updates are likely compatible with home and pro, but you can't have them.

      • I would agree with you, but I didn't buy Windows 10. It was a free upgrade for all my systems running Windows 7. I guess in that case, if Microsoft ever pulls a critical function of Windows 10 that I *ABSOLUTELY NEED*, I suppose I could wipe and reinstall Windows 7.

      • Not upgrading is not a viable option, because you need security patches.

        Not upgrading is not a viable option these days because windows won't let you.

      • Welcome to the unstable and always-shifting world of WIndows 10, where you can't trust that anything in it will still be there or that the workflow you've developed will continue to be applicable when you show up at work the next day.

        • Welcome to the unstable and always-shifting world of **Software As A Service** where you can't trust that anything in it will still be there or that the workflow you've developed will continue to be applicable when you show up at work the next day.

          Kinda generalized that for you. It's a much bigger problem than Windows 10.

    • Re:NO! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:36AM (#54866723) Homepage

      I still use it in a professional setting!

      Same here. It's the quickest way to paste a Printscreen and crop and save to a file. A bloated 3D tool is just a waste.

      Deleting mspaint.exe will not fix Windows bloat. This is just trying to force people to adopt a new tool that does things no one wants. All anyone is going to do is copy mspaint.exe somewhere else and keep using it.

    • Re:NO! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Verdatum ( 1257828 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:37AM (#54866727)
      It's useful because I know the tool will be on any random machine I find myself sitting at. I know there are lots of good free pixel editing tools online, but that's not the point. When forced to work on machines that have things locked down tight, downloading and installing a new tool is not always an option. It's aggravating to track down tools that allow for a user-level execution; and often policy doesn't even want you doing that without approval. MSPaint is useful for the same reason that vi is useful in the *nix world; you know it's already installed and how it will basically behave.

      • When forced to work on machines that have things locked down tight, downloading and installing a new tool is not always an option.

        How are you "forced to work on machines" like that in the first place? Why can't you play the "can't do the job without appropriate tools" card to temporarily decline to work on them pending approval of use of, say, GIMP Portable [portableapps.com]?

        • That's what would happen. But it might take a month. I don't want to backburner a task while waiting for stuff to be installed just because of the whims of Microsoft.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            Then the next step is to investigate why so many tasks are hitting the back burner. If you can show management that tool approval is the leading source of project delays, this might spur an effort to make approval of use of free software more Agile, seeing as Agile is the hot buzzword.

            • Some of us have Actual Work to do that doesn't involve tilting at IT windmills.

              Not arguing with IT about installing some random bit of software on the locked down images is a real plus. Especially when all you need it to crop a bitmapped picture and put a red border around it.

              Horses for courses. Hammers for nails. Remember, when things look as bad as they possibly can, they usually get considerably worse (RAH).

    • Re:NO! (Score:4, Informative)

      by xeoron ( 639412 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:37AM (#54866731) Homepage
      Use the spiritual successor Paint.net [getpaint.net].

      Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

    • You use it? So what. Microsoft quit caring much about user needs/preferences a decade ago.

      I would guess that half the folks around here don't remember that Microsoft's huge success in the 1980s and 1990s was largely based on user friendliness -- inexpensive, non-copy protected, software that mostly sorta worked. Their strategy now is quite clear. Lock in as many users as possible. Minimize support and maintenance costs. And try to keep the franchise going for as many decades as possible while collecti

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Topwiz ( 1470979 )

      I use the version from XP from here: http://www.mspaintxp.com/ [mspaintxp.com].

    • Re:NO! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by decipher_saint ( 72686 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:49AM (#54866833)

      I have Photoshop, SAI, Clip Studio, Inkscape, Paint.NET installed but nothing beats win+r mspaint ctrl+p crop save

      Of all the things that Windows 10 needs un-fucking they pick on one app that's been "good enough" for more than 20 years

    • Most people do, for much the same reason they use notepad or calc. They are hardly the best tool for their dedicated jobs, but being able to find them on every single windows machine you might have to work with is priceless.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        What fraction of Windows PCs that you have encountered are locked down so tight that connecting a flash drive you carry with GIMP Portable [portableapps.com] on it doesn't work?

        • I have worked for a few companies with whom attaching any unapproved flash drive was a firing offense.

    • Second; find a (in the windows ecosystem) universally possible workflow as convenient as follows for making modest annotations on screenshots:

      PrtScn/Alt+PrtScn -> Winkey+R -> mspaint/pbrush -> ctrl+v -> do your doodles -> ctrl+s.

      Perhaps making it slightly less relevant, Windows 8+ allows saving screenshots directly to disk with WinKey+PrtScn

      Also, for reference, Alt+PrtScn only captures the active window, which seems to not be widely known. It's very handy. I seem to remember it also wor

    • I still use it in a professional setting! YES, I AM DEAD SERIOUS.

      Don't worry, they'll probably sell it back to you for a 9.99pcm subscription.

  • They're trying to kill chart brut [gawker.com]... and then all of us!

  • On MSPaint... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:08AM (#54866513)

    It's been too primitive to be very useful for much more than cropping screencaps for some time.

    If it doesn't also soften, scale (without artifact generation), remove noise, adjust contrast, saturation, tint, and brightness, handle at least text as a separate, editable layer, and do blending colour replacement along with handling transparency... meh. It's also handy if it can directly handle multi-frame GIFs and ICO files.

    Still, to this very day I use MSPaint for cropping screencaps because most of the workstations I end up on don't have any graphics software at all.

    • Re:On MSPaint... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dysmal ( 3361085 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:37AM (#54866735)

      Agreed. Paint was never a GOOD program but it's what's installed by default and it works. I'm not going to install something like Greenshot on a server i'm working on but sometimes you need a no frills tool.

    • Re:On MSPaint... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:42AM (#54866763) Homepage

      I have Photoshop. I still use MS Paint for screenshots. Low bloat and launches instantly.

    • It's been too primitive to be very useful for much more than cropping screencaps for some time.

      If it doesn't also soften, scale (without artifact generation), remove noise, adjust contrast, saturation, tint, and brightness, handle at least text as a separate, editable layer, and do blending colour replacement along with handling transparency... meh. It's also handy if it can directly handle multi-frame GIFs and ICO files.

      Still, to this very day I use MSPaint for cropping screencaps because most of the workstations I end up on don't have any graphics software at all.

      It's fine for pixel art... since pixel art doesn't require anything but magnification and a dropper tool.

  • They took aim but hit the wrong target. The program Microsoft needs to kill is Outlook. Thankfully it is not hard to convince people to switch to an open source alternative to paint.

    On the flip side, the problems that come with Outlook will keep many an IT worker employed for the rest of their lives (presuming of course they can stand to fix them for that long).
  • What am I supposed to use for screenshots on base installs?
  • Not only is Paint.NET better than Microsoft Paint, I think it is better than the entry level paint alternatives on linux and MacOS.

    • Not only is Paint.NET better than Microsoft Paint, I think it is better than the entry level paint alternatives on linux and MacOS.

      macOS doesn't even come with a built-in Paint alternative. Paint.NET is better in that it can do more, but it takes longer to load than Paint (which is more or less instant) and sometimes provides too much functionality when all you're trying to do is, for example, crop an image--Paint makes that very simple.

      • macOS doesn't even come with a built-in Paint alternative.

        Most people seem to use Paint to crop and annotate screenshots.
        On the Mac you can use Preview to do that.

  • I still use Paint because its the default edit option for images. To create a YouTube thumbnail, I take a screenshot from a video, right-click on the image, select edit, CTRL-A and CTRL-C in Paint. I open a template in Paint.NET, select the screenshot layer, and CTRL-V to paste screenshot. Technically, I could do all this in Paint.NET but I like having separate programs for different purposes.

  • I wonder how much Adobe would pay... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dmgxmichael ( 1219692 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:28AM (#54866679) Homepage

    ...to have a watered down version of Photoshop Elements included as a gateway to the more expensive Photoshop proper. Done correctly it would be a win for both companies and consumers.

  • This is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard from MS in quite awhile. The backlash on this is gonna be loud. You'd think with all the evil metrics Win10 collects, they'd have some idea about how heavily used this tool is. If Paint3D is a feature-complete replacement, that's fine, but I have no indication that this is the case. And if "deprecated" is just a poorly worded category for "no longer in development" then MS needs to fix it's project categorization terms. If they stop developing it and merely provid

    • You'd think with all the evil metrics Win10 collects, they'd have some idea about how heavily used this tool is.

      Paint 3D is a "modern" app. That means they can collect more evil metrics more easily. The only thing they care about is that it's not packaged as an .exe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

      You'd think with all the evil metrics Win10 collects, they'd have some idea about how heavily used this tool is. If Paint3D is a feature-complete replacement, that's fine, but I have no indication that this is the case.

      What gave you the idea that it was not a feature-complete replacement?

    • You got it backwards: Microsoft knows what people likes and dislikes but they will put politics first. They know people like Paint the same way they know people would rather have no ads on a freaking OS (hello start menu full of publicity and stupid ads on a clean install of Windows 10) but they want to turn Windows into Android (with regards to spying, publicity and pushing the creator's services) and that requires removing some things users want

  • Good! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:30AM (#54866691)

    Next they can get rid of mail, photos, cortana, skype, the xbox crap, onedive, word, notepad, edge, windows app store, 3DBuilder, Appconnector, BingFinance, BingNews, 3dpaint, BingSports, BingWeather, Getstarted, MicrosoftOfficeHub, Solitaire, OneNote, Alarms, Calculator, Camera, Maps, Phone, Reader, SoundRecorder, ZuneMusic, ZuneVideo, windowscommunicationsapps, CloudExperienceHost, WindowsReadingList, Twitter, Flipboard, Shazam, Candy Crush, iHeart Radio, NAVER, tripadvisor, groovemusic, BioEnrollment, WindowsFeedback and ContactSupport from the default install!!

    All of which are crap or a better open source alternative exists. Choosing windows to run programs shouldnt have to force you into all their bloatware and ads too.

    • [A laundry list]

      All of which are crap or a better open source alternative exists.

      Among the applications you listed are music store, music streaming, music identification video store, and video streaming apps. What's the free replacement for each? What's the appropriate way to obtain an OAuth key pair for a free Twitter client when Twitter can and does revoke API keys that leak to the public [nelhage.com]? And what's the free replacement for Skype that can perform text, voice, and video chat with users on your existing Skype contact list or with Skype users who have invited you to text, voice, or vide

  • Can I copy the EXE file? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by acoustix ( 123925 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @09:43AM (#54866773)

    What does mspaint.exe need to run? Are there any DLL files needed? Can I just copy the EXE from my Windows 7 box to Win10?

  • ...Paint will draw the rest of the company with it

  • Nothing beats MS Paint for casual doodling.

  • Free - Paint.net (Score:3)

    by jzarling ( 600712 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @10:05AM (#54866969)
    Paint.NET is free and has a few useful tools rolled in - Its also a bit easier for low clue user to pickup than GIMP in my experiences.
  • Maybe now I won't have to deal with emails at work that have a huge screen print of text that would have been much more appropriate to copy/paste. This is especially bad with command line output. Users will send you a screenshot of the cmd.exe window rather than just copying/pasting the contents. This means I can't copy/paste the parts of the content for my own use, and instead have to type crap out myself, which will inevitably lead to typos and such.

  • And nothing of value was lost (Score:3)

    by sandbagger ( 654585 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @10:56AM (#54867375)

    Seriously, the sheer lack of incremental development on Paint is a bit of a head scratcher. I suspect that the ignoring of Paint was the result of it being orphaned in the Microsoft-Adobe pact of the early 2000s that resembled the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. MS killed their graphics products and Adobe killed Persuasion and their other office products.

  • This is sad news (Score:3)

    by JohnFen ( 1641097 ) on Monday July 24, 2017 @10:57AM (#54867379)

    MS Paint ranks third on my list of "most frequently used MS tools", behind Visual Studio and Notepad. For many use cases, the simple spartan tools are the best tools.

    Ah well, I'm sure there's a third-party equivalent somewhere.

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