Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

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I just want to take a moment to rant about what an awful user experience Paint 3D was for me. I was using Windows for a short while because graphics under Linux weren't working well (GPU was new at the time, it took a couple of months for it to become reliable enough to use as a daily driver under Linux), and installed the Creator's update, which setup Paint 3D as the default program for every image file it could recognize. Paint 3D is a joke for all the image stuff I want to do; cropping, resizing, highlighting, mostly, and the user interface was pretty confusing all around.

And, I couldn't figure out how to uninstall it! It wasn't uninstallable in the normal ways, and I don't think I ever figured out how to do so.

I won't miss Paint, and I never used it, but I definitely don't consider Paint 3D an upgrade or improvement. And, I really hate Microsoft's standard practice of replacing file associations even if I've already setup my own before one of their apps gets installed (I had a couple of other tools setup for images, and they got replaced in the defaults for like 30 file types). They do it with pretty much every app they distribute. It's presumptuous.

lots of people raging..... about resizing and cropping.... So I figure I'd have a go

I haven't used Paint 3d before until a few moments ago, and very quickly worked out how to resize and crop an image. Seemed simple enough. The image resizing is actually better than most I've seen.

It's not so much that I couldn't have figured it out (though I seem to recall it was not immediately obvious how to do anything, to me), rather it changed my selected applications. I'd set it up the way I liked it, with software I was familiar with and happy with...and an OS update removed that configuration and pointed to Paint 3D instead, an application I hadn't asked for, and seemingly could not uninstall (at least, I couldn't figure out how to uninstall it using the normal process for uninstalling applications).

I should be clear: I don't know Windows. I've used it very rarely over the past couple of decades. I keep a Windows partition around for gaming and audio work (though even that no longer really requires Windows these days, as my favorite games are on Linux and even audio isn't awful under Linux anymore). So, if someone knows their way around Windows, my complaints might seem sort of stupid. Maybe it's trivial to fix all of the annoyances I had; but they were frustrating for me. For me, there was just mysterious stuff happening on my machine and I didn't know how to fix it and I didn't like it.

I think most people would say the same for MSPaint, too. It's why I use Paint.NET, which is simple to use but also has a lot of great features.

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