4 ms·

I admit it’s a while since I’ve used windows, but it’s such a shock to hear that MS Paint isn’t just a point and click pixel coloring app anymore. It seems like

I admit it’s a while since I’ve used windows, but it’s such a shock to hear that MS Paint isn’t just a point and click pixel coloring app anymore. It seems like they could have left it as a pure “paint” app and added the fancy stuff to some new image editor or something. I guess they’ve optimized their workforce to just keep making changes so they get promoted rather than just creating really good software.

darig 2mo ago
[dead]
SideQuark 2mo ago
If you read the article instead of the headline…….. it’s adding a fairly standard mark to AI generated images to let’s others know, in the same manner a giant swath of the GebAI industry has agreed to.
- trickypr 2mo ago
  I think their point is that paint shouldn’t have any GenAI features (or any new features other than compatibility)
  - SideQuark 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - qu4z-2 2mo ago
      I don't so much mind about Paint, but modern Notepad is completely unusable. We had "Notepad but with Rich Text formatting" -- it was called WordPad and no-one used it so they eventually deleted it.
      - brudgers 2mo ago
        People used Wordpad and thus other people had trouble opening RTF files.
      - aizk 2mo ago
        Not to mention that notepad had a 7.8 CVE (an RCE) earlier this year -- https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-20841 https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-20841
      - scythe 2mo ago
        >Notepad but with Rich Text formatting TextEdit on Mac uses RTF. Perhaps that's why Windows switched.
      - brian-armstrong 2mo ago
        The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me. There's been every indication that it will keep going like this for years now, and the cost of switching is just not that high. If you're still riding that train it's time to just embrace it.
        protocolture 2mo ago
        >The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me. What confuses me is how people think theres anything close to an alternative for corporate environments. Windows isnt Windows. Windows is the best supported OS by the Microsoft cloud stack. They get away with this sort of nonsense because large corps have nowhere to go. >the cost of switching is just not that high. Lol, lmao even. The cost of switching one laptop to linux is quite low. The cost of taking an enterprise using Microsoft everywhere to linux is something else entirely.
        flatline 2mo ago
        I’m not sure why you were downvoted. I have to use Windows for work. The barrier to entry is simply lower for many system administrators and users alike. The homogeneity of a Windows rollout is extremely attractive. You are going to have a hard sell getting your accounting team and receptionist onto Linux. Your developers will complain and make do. I love complaining about Windows!
    - CodeMage 2mo ago
      > Yes, using original paint in 16 colors saved to PCX in 640x480 should be enough for anybody. There's a wide, wide gap between adding features that your users need and adding features that you want to cram down their throats to promote other products that you want them to use. > Or we could let owners of properties add features as they see fit. Or we could let paying users offer legitimate criticism of the products they use, without essentially telling them to shut up.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    That's just nostalgia. Why do we set the bar at windows XP paint instead of windows 1.01 paint which was different? Probably because winXP paint is the one we grew up with, and also the best version. But if we said no new features ever, we'd be stuck on win1.01 paint. The best version of Paint was a complete UI redesign away from the original.
- buzer 2mo ago
  I don't think adding an identifier which can most likely be mapped back to user is "standard mark". It doesn't explicitly say it, but there is hardly any other reason why it would add server generated ID (from authenticated session) to the saved file.
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago
  It's a problem on so many levels. We've probably lost the fight over GenAI marks, at least for now, and I do understand the need for them. However the same technology that can embed an invisible watermark that survives a round of photographing, printing, crumbling and scanning back - can be used to embed more information than just "it's AI generated". Encoding GUID is just a harbinger; as a next step, why not encode the app that produced the image? Also a hash of its license key? Hell, what's stopping an app from doing it itself, watermarking its own window before passing the pixels to OS for compositing? "Robust GenAI watermark" today is "robust general-purpose DRM watermark" tomorrow :).
  - SideQuark 2mo ago
    EU law requires the mark. Did you know about the level of the “so many levels”? If such a large market requires behavior by law, and quite reasonably so, it’s also quite reasonable to mark AI generated content as such. All the slippery slope nonsense on this page has failed so many times it’s not worth debating. If you don’t like this tool, use another. When they embed your social security number and face and address in the mark get back to me.
SilasX 2mo ago
Even Notepad isn’t a dumb app anymore! They made breaking changes after 40 years so it has autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot. If I wanted all of that, I would have used a different app!
- pxoe 2mo ago
  I wanted dark mode, tabs, and autosave, and now I don't have to use a different app to get those, so that works out great for me. Not sure what "breaking changes" even means for that though. Did it suddenly stop being able to open text files? No, it still just works.
  - drdexebtjl 2mo ago
    IIRC they did make a breaking change by changing the default character encoding to UTF-8 without BOM. They also started rendering and preserving Unix-style line endings (LF). Very welcome breaking changes :)
    - pxoe 2mo ago
      That's a really fair point, but i'm not sure if that's what they meant by "breaking changes" if that was followed with "autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot"
  - SilasX 2mo ago
    "Breaking change" is a pretty common term, especially here, so I don't get the confusion about what it means. It means an interface-breaking change, so that the same input produces a different output, and is generally to be avoided because it forces the user to have to adapt and means the new version isn't strictly better[1]. The inclusion of autocorrect (that I mentioned) would be example here: previously, it would accept whatever text you gave it verbatim. Now, it will sometimes change non-dictionary strings to dictionary words. (Another thing that bothered me was that, on the update, it forgot my font settings and I had to work to re-find them.) I'm happy to admit my phrasing was confusing, but not enough so that you would be unable to see the relevant failure mode. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/21703427 https://stackoverflow.com/a/21703427
pxoe 2mo ago
Background removal is really useful though, saves a bunch of time. Unfortunately, some of the regular paint tools like eraser don't erase in a smooth antialiased way and just end up looking jagged (also only a square shape for eraser...no eraser brush mode unfortunately), so it ends up being a better looking option (well, when it works properly, which it does often enough to be useful). For whatever reason a bunch of tools and transforms (scaling, rotating), just produce such garbage jagged looking results, it's not serviceable even for those basics.
- cj 2mo ago
  Pixelation was a feature back in the 90’s and 2000’s. But yea, I guess it’s a bug in 2026.
  - pxoe 2mo ago
    It's been a "bug" for several decades now. Not everything was of shitty jagged quality in either 90s or 00s. Particularly when using some more capable image editors.
    - cj 2mo ago
      If you’re actually intended to Paint in MS Paint, as in create things from scratch, you need to limit the upper end of quality for it to be usable. Otherwise you might as well use photoshop. (But no I’m not kidding myself, I realize the days of using Paint to actually Paint are over)
      - pxoe 2mo ago
        There's a bunch of smaller editors that don't have such problems, like paint.net for example. It's an arbitrary "limit" (accidental even) stemming purely from bad quality implementation of basic features, not from how basic that feature set is.
        cj 2mo ago
        I like the original commenter’s compromise. > It seems like they could have left it as a pure “paint” app and added the fancy stuff to some new image editor or something. Apple Text Edit vs Pages.
alterom 2mo ago
JSPaint to the rescue: https://jspaint.app/ https://jspaint.app/ It's a pixel-perfect modern clone (with some actually useful extras that won't get in the way unless you look for them), and yes, you can clone the repo and run it locally.
a-dub 2mo ago
it is kind of interesting when you think about it. what utility does something like paint actually have? did it ever have any real utility? (icon editing?) it always kinda felt like a demo that came with early versions of windows that didn't actually do anything useful.
- Aerroon 2mo ago
  Cropping and editing screenshots (eg add red circle) in a very lightweight application. Other image editing applications can do all of that, but they take 10 years to launch (during which they will ask for focus) and 2 GB of RAM.
  - zdc1 2mo ago
    Yeah, the main use for old school Paint seems to be just adding text, copying a selection, and pasting somewhere else. I assume regular home users may have different expectations for what Paint should be able to do.
  - a-dub 2mo ago
    ahh. kde has all that built directly into the screenshot utility. highlighting, text, cropping, etc.
    - Aerroon 1mo ago
      I haven't used that in kde, but I've used the windows snipping tool and that one isn't as useful to me. Usually I want to take the screenshot now and then edit it a minute later. Paint works great for that.
- opan 2mo ago
  Used to be you saved and shared screenshots by pasting into Paint and saving it. Printscreen didn't save a file and only some programs (Skype) let you paste the screenshot directly from the clipboard. That's how I remember it anyway.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo ago

darig 2mo ago

[dead]

SideQuark 2mo ago

If you read the article instead of the headline…….. it’s adding a fairly standard mark to AI generated images to let’s others know, in the same manner a giant swath of the GebAI industry has agreed to.

trickypr 2mo ago
I think their point is that paint shouldn’t have any GenAI features (or any new features other than compatibility)
- SideQuark 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - qu4z-2 2mo ago
    I don't so much mind about Paint, but modern Notepad is completely unusable. We had "Notepad but with Rich Text formatting" -- it was called WordPad and no-one used it so they eventually deleted it.
    - brudgers 2mo ago
      People used Wordpad and thus other people had trouble opening RTF files.
    - aizk 2mo ago
      Not to mention that notepad had a 7.8 CVE (an RCE) earlier this year -- https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-20841 https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-20841
    - scythe 2mo ago
      >Notepad but with Rich Text formatting TextEdit on Mac uses RTF. Perhaps that's why Windows switched.
    - brian-armstrong 2mo ago
      The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me. There's been every indication that it will keep going like this for years now, and the cost of switching is just not that high. If you're still riding that train it's time to just embrace it.
      - protocolture 2mo ago
        >The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me. What confuses me is how people think theres anything close to an alternative for corporate environments. Windows isnt Windows. Windows is the best supported OS by the Microsoft cloud stack. They get away with this sort of nonsense because large corps have nowhere to go. >the cost of switching is just not that high. Lol, lmao even. The cost of switching one laptop to linux is quite low. The cost of taking an enterprise using Microsoft everywhere to linux is something else entirely.
        flatline 2mo ago
        I’m not sure why you were downvoted. I have to use Windows for work. The barrier to entry is simply lower for many system administrators and users alike. The homogeneity of a Windows rollout is extremely attractive. You are going to have a hard sell getting your accounting team and receptionist onto Linux. Your developers will complain and make do. I love complaining about Windows!
  - CodeMage 2mo ago
    > Yes, using original paint in 16 colors saved to PCX in 640x480 should be enough for anybody. There's a wide, wide gap between adding features that your users need and adding features that you want to cram down their throats to promote other products that you want them to use. > Or we could let owners of properties add features as they see fit. Or we could let paying users offer legitimate criticism of the products they use, without essentially telling them to shut up.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  That's just nostalgia. Why do we set the bar at windows XP paint instead of windows 1.01 paint which was different? Probably because winXP paint is the one we grew up with, and also the best version. But if we said no new features ever, we'd be stuck on win1.01 paint. The best version of Paint was a complete UI redesign away from the original.
buzer 2mo ago
I don't think adding an identifier which can most likely be mapped back to user is "standard mark". It doesn't explicitly say it, but there is hardly any other reason why it would add server generated ID (from authenticated session) to the saved file.
TeMPOraL 2mo ago
It's a problem on so many levels. We've probably lost the fight over GenAI marks, at least for now, and I do understand the need for them. However the same technology that can embed an invisible watermark that survives a round of photographing, printing, crumbling and scanning back - can be used to embed more information than just "it's AI generated". Encoding GUID is just a harbinger; as a next step, why not encode the app that produced the image? Also a hash of its license key? Hell, what's stopping an app from doing it itself, watermarking its own window before passing the pixels to OS for compositing? "Robust GenAI watermark" today is "robust general-purpose DRM watermark" tomorrow :).
- SideQuark 2mo ago
  EU law requires the mark. Did you know about the level of the “so many levels”? If such a large market requires behavior by law, and quite reasonably so, it’s also quite reasonable to mark AI generated content as such. All the slippery slope nonsense on this page has failed so many times it’s not worth debating. If you don’t like this tool, use another. When they embed your social security number and face and address in the mark get back to me.

SilasX 2mo ago

Even Notepad isn’t a dumb app anymore! They made breaking changes after 40 years so it has autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot. If I wanted all of that, I would have used a different app!

pxoe 2mo ago
I wanted dark mode, tabs, and autosave, and now I don't have to use a different app to get those, so that works out great for me. Not sure what "breaking changes" even means for that though. Did it suddenly stop being able to open text files? No, it still just works.
- drdexebtjl 2mo ago
  IIRC they did make a breaking change by changing the default character encoding to UTF-8 without BOM. They also started rendering and preserving Unix-style line endings (LF). Very welcome breaking changes :)
  - pxoe 2mo ago
    That's a really fair point, but i'm not sure if that's what they meant by "breaking changes" if that was followed with "autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot"
- SilasX 2mo ago
  "Breaking change" is a pretty common term, especially here, so I don't get the confusion about what it means. It means an interface-breaking change, so that the same input produces a different output, and is generally to be avoided because it forces the user to have to adapt and means the new version isn't strictly better[1]. The inclusion of autocorrect (that I mentioned) would be example here: previously, it would accept whatever text you gave it verbatim. Now, it will sometimes change non-dictionary strings to dictionary words. (Another thing that bothered me was that, on the update, it forgot my font settings and I had to work to re-find them.) I'm happy to admit my phrasing was confusing, but not enough so that you would be unable to see the relevant failure mode. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/21703427 https://stackoverflow.com/a/21703427

pxoe 2mo ago

Background removal is really useful though, saves a bunch of time. Unfortunately, some of the regular paint tools like eraser don't erase in a smooth antialiased way and just end up looking jagged (also only a square shape for eraser...no eraser brush mode unfortunately), so it ends up being a better looking option (well, when it works properly, which it does often enough to be useful). For whatever reason a bunch of tools and transforms (scaling, rotating), just produce such garbage jagged looking results, it's not serviceable even for those basics.

cj 2mo ago
Pixelation was a feature back in the 90’s and 2000’s. But yea, I guess it’s a bug in 2026.
- pxoe 2mo ago
  It's been a "bug" for several decades now. Not everything was of shitty jagged quality in either 90s or 00s. Particularly when using some more capable image editors.
  - cj 2mo ago
    If you’re actually intended to Paint in MS Paint, as in create things from scratch, you need to limit the upper end of quality for it to be usable. Otherwise you might as well use photoshop. (But no I’m not kidding myself, I realize the days of using Paint to actually Paint are over)
    - pxoe 2mo ago
      There's a bunch of smaller editors that don't have such problems, like paint.net for example. It's an arbitrary "limit" (accidental even) stemming purely from bad quality implementation of basic features, not from how basic that feature set is.
      - cj 2mo ago
        I like the original commenter’s compromise. > It seems like they could have left it as a pure “paint” app and added the fancy stuff to some new image editor or something. Apple Text Edit vs Pages.

alterom 2mo ago

JSPaint to the rescue: https://jspaint.app/ https://jspaint.app/ It's a pixel-perfect modern clone (with some actually useful extras that won't get in the way unless you look for them), and yes, you can clone the repo and run it locally.

a-dub 2mo ago

it is kind of interesting when you think about it. what utility does something like paint actually have? did it ever have any real utility? (icon editing?) it always kinda felt like a demo that came with early versions of windows that didn't actually do anything useful.

Aerroon 2mo ago
Cropping and editing screenshots (eg add red circle) in a very lightweight application. Other image editing applications can do all of that, but they take 10 years to launch (during which they will ask for focus) and 2 GB of RAM.
- zdc1 2mo ago
  Yeah, the main use for old school Paint seems to be just adding text, copying a selection, and pasting somewhere else. I assume regular home users may have different expectations for what Paint should be able to do.
- a-dub 2mo ago
  ahh. kde has all that built directly into the screenshot utility. highlighting, text, cropping, etc.
  - Aerroon 1mo ago
    I haven't used that in kde, but I've used the windows snipping tool and that one isn't as useful to me. Usually I want to take the screenshot now and then edit it a minute later. Paint works great for that.
opan 2mo ago
Used to be you saved and shared screenshots by pasting into Paint and saving it. Printscreen didn't save a file and only some programs (Skype) let you paste the screenshot directly from the clipboard. That's how I remember it anyway.
applfanboysbgon 2mo ago