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Comment by chowderman | Hacker News Reader

you know it! It had a sleek and modern look for the time, while still having the simplicity and user-friendliness of MS Paint from Win 95/98. really wish this version of paint was still supported in Win 10

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A sleek and modern look for the time? The basic UI was already over a decade old! (paintbrush)

It's cool that you like it, but that's a surprising way to describe it. As I recall (as a user of windows 3.1, 95, ME and XP), the consensus was that Paint was a retro holdover, like Minesweeper and Solitaire. People appreciated it in a kitschy retro way.

We still have Notepad.

And Ubuntu still ships with ed. Some people like their "retro" tools that have shipped with the OS since early versions.

Surely it can be packed as an Electron app?

Why would you do that? If it runs in a web page, it could be condensed to a single .html file.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a stripped-to-the-bone installation of WinXP in a VM, running only Paint, is lighter on system resources than Electron running this.

A very basic XP install with a GUI can fit in 20-30 MB[1][2][3], using minlogon, but even with a "standard" Winlogon it should be below 50 MB, so it surely would take less disk space than the hypothetical 100 MB electron based version.

[1] http://reboot.pro/topic/3717-xpsp1-with-full-commandline-and...

[2]http://reboot.pro/topic/16765-minixp/

[3]http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/MiniXP/

It can be packed very easily actually! It is a single HTML file, so you can easily embed it into an electron app or a webview if you wanted. Only problem is it would bring the total size to ~100 MB instead of ~1 MB, and would be tough to make it a single .exe file.

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