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Comment by malekpour | Hacker News Reader

There are much better free [web based] alternatives for WordPad, Paint and Notepad these days and I prefer to use those over these obsolete applications. These are not useful applications, we just like them because of nostalgia.

I doubt if Microsoft is removing Paint because of OS base image size. It should be more about source code maintenance and UI consistency. Both WordPad and Paint got ribbon user interface for Windows 7 and calc.exe has been replace by a modern Windows Store app in Windows 10.

Why should Microsoft spend time and resource to keep these applications up to date while majority of users are using better free alternatives?

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In general, Web based apps aren't useful when taking notes or screeenshots trying to figure out/document why/that networking isn't working...

> These are not useful applications, we just like them because of nostalgia.

On the contrary; I have Paint.net and GIMP installed, I've experimented with both of them, and I still don't have a tool as quick and easy for marking up a screenshot as Paint is. At that singular task it is superb.

I create a lot of training material, so marking up screenshots is a significant component of my job. This will make my job harder for no good reason.

Asking because I'm unclear: While you have to go to the Windows Store for getting the app, it is still local after installation, right? In that case, how does it make your job harder? Installation time will be a trivial fraction of the use time, no?

GIMP is not a good alternative for Paint. Have you ever used [https://sketch.io/sketchpad/] ?

Windows Snipping Tool is a very good tool for taking screen shots.

7Zip and VLC are good examples. The community accepted to download and use many community driven projects over Microsoft provided tools.

Microsoft should take those apps and put them into Windows by default. It's a trivial thing for us in the tech community to install these ourselves. However, a significant population remains unaware.

Why should I waste time installing those apps? Or Internet traffic and even some CPU with web based apps?

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