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.
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.
I've been using ComfyUI to do fine background and watermark removal. Might take a look into that as an alternative. Run Flux.2 Klein or Comfyui's own workflow.
Key point, saves a bunch of time. Copy, paste, click button, done in three seconds. The app is also just there, preinstalled. It's great precisely because it doesn't require "looking into" anything. Yes, there's a bunch of other apps and services, but that's all besides that point. It also works pretty much on any pc made in past decade and half without crazy gpu/vram requirements for a relatively miniscule task.
Pixelation was a feature back in the 90’s and 2000’s.
But yea, I guess it’s a bug in 2026.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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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.
I think their point is that paint shouldn’t have any GenAI features (or any new features other than compatibility)
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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.
> it was called WordPad and no-one used it so they eventually deleted it.
about a third of windows users used wordpad. that's not a small amount
the issue, as i see it, is that they took two tools with two different user communities and slammed them together
>about a third of windows users used wordpad.
What's your source? I'm curious about use rates of other tools, I didn't know MS published that info.
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.
>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.
Not to mention that notepad had a 7.8 CVE (an RCE) earlier this year -- https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-20841
People used Wordpad and thus other people had trouble opening RTF files.
>Notepad but with Rich Text formatting
TextEdit on Mac uses RTF. Perhaps that's why Windows switched.
> 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.
JSPaint to the rescue:
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.
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!
It automatically saves and reopens whatever you previously pasted in there. Quite a shock the first few times it happens. It's not a safe temporary holding area anymore.
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.
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 :)
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"
For a long time I used metapad as a notepad replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapad (I even renamed the exe to notepad). Very fast and minimal.
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