'Paint' and 'WordPad' Will Soon Become Optional Features In Windows 10 (neowin.net) 90
An anonymous reader quotes Neowin:
Both WordPad and the classic Paint app can now be found in the list of optional features for Windows 10, joining the ranks of other hallmarks of the Windows of yore, such as Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. This means that both these apps will be uninstallable in a future release of Windows, likely 20H1, as build 18963 is a preview of that branch of Windows 10's development...
Of course, optional features can always be reinstalled so Paint won't really be disappearing anytime soon. Indeed, the company was planning to keep the app alive through the Microsoft Store anyway. Just don't hold out any hope for the app receiving new features anytime soon, what with Microsoft putting its weight behind the newer, sexier and higher dimensional Paint 3D.
Of course, optional features can always be reinstalled so Paint won't really be disappearing anytime soon. Indeed, the company was planning to keep the app alive through the Microsoft Store anyway. Just don't hold out any hope for the app receiving new features anytime soon, what with Microsoft putting its weight behind the newer, sexier and higher dimensional Paint 3D.
Normal (Score:4, Insightful)
Even Windows 10 itself being optional ...
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Re: Normal (Score:1)
That is finally changing. I'm not suggesting windows is falling behind, just that with platforms like steam and lutris, which can already run quite a few mainstream games (and well I should add), gamers may soon have more of a choice.
I think if nothing else, a platform like steam may bring linux more front and center to game studios and hardware manufacturers.
I no longer feel as though its an if, its a when. Just so much movement as of late.
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That's rich coming from the moron posting racist, anti-gay and otherwise hateful spam on a tech forum.
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Re:Normal (Score:4, Interesting)
I would love the inverse of WSL with a Win32 subsystem on Linux instead of using Wine where I can run native Win32 apps on Linux without modification or hacks
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So... official support for Wine from Microsoft? That would be great, but it's not very likely. Wine essentially is the "Linux Subsystem for Windows". Conceptually speaking there isn't all that much difference. The modifications and hacks are because (a) it's a lot easier to imitate an open operating system than a proprietary one since there is no need for reverse engineering, (b) when you do have issues with the emulation it's much easier to resolve them with access to the applications' source code, and (c)
Windows Media Center? (Score:3)
Microsoft seems to be taking Windows OS in a direction that will eventually be even worse than now. It amazes me that updates to Windows 10 often cause problems.
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Hate to tell you, but Quicken/QuickBooks and H&R Block are nowadays simple frontends to their online application, hence the need for a monthly subscription to keep their infrastructure afloat.
What is old is new again (Score:2)
In Windows XP and earlier you could add/remove such programs via Add/Remove Windows Components menu. Apparently that changed in Vista?
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Re:What is old is new again (Score:4, Insightful)
In Windows XP and earlier you could add/remove such programs via Add/Remove Windows Components menu. Apparently that changed in Vista?
Not quite old is new. These programs have both been replaced by other irremovable apps. They are just driving adoption of their replacement by depreciating the other.
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Features are still there with MS adding more of them. Hyper-v and of course WSL needs to be turned on before you can even add Ubuntu or Debian from the Windows Store.
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The Windows Store is useless. It does not work without a Microsoft Spyware account. The primary purpose of the Windows Store is to get people to have a Microsoft Spyware account.
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Starting with Windows Vista all the features are always installed. Yes, I mean that. When you change their status in Windows Features, Windows just creates/removes hard links in system32/program files/whatever and lnk files.
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They are compressed in cab files. They are not actually there which is a good thing for security. WSL, docker, IIS, hyper-v, you do not want to have on every desktop for obvious reasons.
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I miss Windows 3.x, 9x, etc. that had custom installations. Newer Windows, mac OS, etc. do not let you do that anymore. :(
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MacOS, or should I say Macintosh System, used to have custom install, too. It was fine provided you never had to install updates or patches. Once updates got involved it always turned into a pain. It lost most of its usefulness when disk space started to grow much faster than system software.
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So, before X? I never installed the classic Mac OS before. Only X and newer.
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Yes, before Mac OS X. You used to be able to not install some components of Mac OS X, too. The BSD Subsystem was optional initially, but developers always installed it, and inadvertently made their applications depend on it, so Apple made it required to avoid user frustration. Chinese/Japanese/Korean language support was optional, and some of the dictionaries were optional at some point, too.
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Thanks. I looked at screen shots. I always hate those installations that want to throw everything. Like I don't need their games!
WordPad sucks, but Notepad sucks worse (Score:2)
Windows has always made users suffer because there's no command that simply displays the contents of a file in a reasonable form. Notepad completely fails on displaying a text file written in Linux because of the CR/LF vs LF issue, and Wordpad does better on that front. Both are crap with other unprintable characters and long lines.
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Re:WordPad sucks, but Notepad sucks worse (Score:5, Informative)
Notepad supports both lineendings as of last year.
But both apps have a purpose. They are the "nano" of the Windows world. A simple editor that can get you somewhere in a pinch but not something that you'd actually *want* to use for anything productive.
Re:WordPad sucks, but Notepad sucks worse (Score:5, Informative)
Some people just need to edit or open a file or config. Notepad fits the bill fine. There are free alternatives now like notepad++ and visual studio code if you need something more powerful.
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Nope, it still copies out the line breaks as of Win7's version.
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You're in luck sir. Notepad as of Windows 10 1809 supports Mac and Linux cr/lf. Which is last falls feature update https://arstechnica.com/gadget... [arstechnica.com]
Oddly, since Balmer left MS has tried to listen to it's users more. If you own your PC you may want to turn on Windows update to get it. WSL also supports Unix network sockets now so you can run Apache and has updated openssh outside of WSL as well.
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" If you own your PC you may want to turn on Windows update"
I'll let you think a while as to why this is a horrible statement to make.
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Some people on slashdot say with a smile they disable Windows update. Little do they know with the pro version you can delay both feature and security updates.
Why is that stupid? Or if you run a work PC then yes you probably have an old version of 10 with no rights to upgrade
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So not being able to be an update guinea pig is a "pro" feature on Windows?
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"Little do they know with the pro version you can delay both feature and security updates."
I don't need a pro version to stop that - I block MS shit at my router and have a registry edit to totally hose Windows Update on my system.
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No it still doesn't.
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If you own your PC, you probably already figured out that you may only keep it if you turned off Windows altogether.
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The soft CR means saving in notepad alters where the cursor is. Hope that's fixed, there's been binary patches available for decades now to fix that.
Notepad and WordPad both suck. I just use write.exe these days.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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For me, Notepad has the one pro over Wordpad that I never wonder if the program is trying to add formatting code to something that is supposed to be raw text. Notepad doesn't attempt to be smart at anything, it's really just a minor GUI upgrade over good ol' edit.
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there's no command that simply displays the contents of a file in a reasonable form.
How about:
and in older Win versions, you could edit with:
About time (Score:3, Informative)
I still cringe when I see people print screening, opening up paint, hitting paste, drawing on the picture with a paintbrush and then saving the file to disk before emailing it to someone. That made sense 20 years ago, but not in 2019 when windows+shift+s opens up a tool expressly built for the purpose including the ability to crop irregular shapes, annotate, and share via email or whatever with a single button click.
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Thanks, I was wondering what I occasionally hit to bring up that shite. It gets in the way when I'm trying to paste a print screen into paint.
Re: About time (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes sense today when Windows 7 didn't and likely doesn't have the Ctrl+Shift+S keyboard shortcut. And Windows 7 is still in active use.
Ctrl+Shift+S will make sense in 2023 when it is universal job transferable skill, and a default feature of any machine a tech can be reasonably expected to support.
Unless you can pay to upgrade all Windows 7 computers for business and end users, associated user software and devices no longer supported since XP, and provide all end users with the equivalence of 2 to 4 years of experience with Windows 10 circa 2017 or later, when that feature was added... A feature of a line of operating systems must exist for four plus years from the date of the last deployment of the previous version which did not include said feature, for that feature to be expect to be in common use.
So, uh yeah, try to avoid cringing,...
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Meh, paint works fine. It's the right-sized tool for cropping screenshots. It doesn't try to be social media, thankfully.
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Windows Shift S. Alright, lemme just do that on my Model M key-oh wait...
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So several clicks of a button, wasting tons of time.
Try ALT-PRTSCRN, which gets your currently-open window into your copy-paste buffer.
Who is the real dumbass here? I can do with TWO keys what you morons are proposing to do with three keys or five fucking clicks.
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I use a Sun USB keyboard where is this Windows key you talk of?
It doesn't make sense to change a cross-platform key combination after a good 5 decades of intuiting what the print screen key does. At least on Mac I simply get the screen shot in my copy/paste buffer and can simply paste it as an image in any sensible application.
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Nah. Like with any default Windows application, it's long been replaced by superior freeware tools.
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what doesn't make sense is that the printscreen key doesnt open the screenshot app .... many linux distro have that as a default
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There is one use case where print screening is optimal: You're trying to take a picture of something that is changing, eg. a small game without a dedicated screenshot button. You don't have time to aim the tool, you have to do the cropping later.
Why? (Score:3)
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Because they have nothing. So now they are removing applications that they think only few people care about and try to sell that as "improvement".
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? Because
they work
and Microsoft can't survive unless computer users keep lowering their expectations.
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Mind boggling innovation out of Redmond. (Score:1)
How many teams of marking and developers came up with this idea?
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Probably was years in the planning....
Windows 10 Shareholders update (Score:1)
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Roughly 10 years after everyone replaced Notepad with Notepad++.
Odd update (Score:1)
MS did something odd to Home edition of Paint about a week ago. The deprecation notice in the upper right of the tool-bar went away, but the arrow keys and other features started acting strange.
The arrows keys stopped obeying the keyboard repeat-delay settings of the OS, meaning they repeat more easily now. Fine-positioning via the arrow keys is one of the few nice features of Paint, but this makes it harder to use arrow keys.
It's also harder to drag small "sliced out" sections, being more likely to be inte
Great innovation! We needed that! (Score:2)
In other news, Windows has been stagnant for a long time now, except for features nobody wants and some moves backwards (snooping on users, unstable "upgrades", etc.).
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They're just learning from Apple.
Did you think Microsoft came up with something on their own?
Things I want to be optional in Windows 10 (Score:2)
- incessant 'updates' that nuke everything in sight for no apparent improvement
- applications that keep changing my default "open with" settings
- simple applications like File Explorer and OneDrive thrashing my system into not being able to keep up with mouse movement
- removal of features
(and that's not a complete list)
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Add Cortana. What a POS.
And get rid of 'PC settings'. Control Panel works just fine.
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While their at it, XBox services on Server 2016... (Score:2)
Wordpad is for Foo-Foo Yuppies (Score:2)
Notepad FTW, bitches!
Nice... (Score:1)
Default apps that exist since day zero in Windows and everyone uses? Letâ(TM)s get rid of them! Nobody will ever complain.
Now, weâ(TM)ll have enough megabytes in the PCs to shove him millions and millions of ads down their collective throats. Cause thatâ(TM)s what operating systems are for: ad serving platforms for the masses, right?
New features for Paint ? (Score:2)
"Just don't hold out any hope for the app receiving new features anytime soon," I don't recall a new feature for Paint being added since it originally came out. I'm guessing as long as Microsoft supports some version of 32 bit programs, in Windows, Paint will be around.
This feels shortsighted (Score:2)
Small, simple applications for doing fast things, which can always be counted on.
Not a smart move.
Clever (Score:2)
They make applications that are actually in use optional, people keep installing them and they can claim that people are absolutely happy with what Windows has to offer so it's fine that things are installed by default and un-uninstallable because people like the "Windows Experience" as it is.
While at the same time forcing people to actually use that Windows Store to get the applications they actually need and use.
If they were serious, rubbish like Cortana would be optional.
Meanwhile... (Score:1)
Candycrush and that Xbox thingy will become mandatory.