MS Paint Adds Freeform Rotation (2026) | Hacker News Reader

MS Paint Adds Freeform Rotation (2026)

blogs.windows.com

44 pointstelestew52 comments

> Some Windows Insiders will see a refreshed SCOOBE screen (Second Chance Out of Box Experience)

Glad they have such a cute acronym that, when unwrapped, still doesn't reveal what it truly is (trying to trick you into enabling Microsoft services every time your PC updates)

I have already told my expensive PC 1000 times that I don't want to use Edge or OneDrive. It continues to harass me about it during general use (random pop-ups to enable OneDrive have the option to remind me in a week or a month, no "leave me alone, stop asking"), and every update too needs to try and trick me into opting in. There's absolutely no end to which Microsoft isn't willing to tastelessly abuse their lock-in.

My grandma nearly fell for one of those. Luckily her card refused it for one reason or another, but we could have easily not known about it for months of paying for Office for no reason.

Wow it's so lame. "SCOOBE". Just to shove Edge et al in your face.

> This redesigned screen is meant to be more intuitive and streamlined, allowing you to choose the recommended settings you want for your PC without having to navigate through multiple setup screens.

...

bah.

I guess I'll give them credit for reducing multiple screens of upsell trickery with UI anti-patterns to a single screen of upsell trickery with UI anti-patterns.

But I'd still prefer zero.

> allowing you to choose the recommended settings you want for your PC …

Okay? …

> without having to navigate through multiple setup screens [which have been greatly enhanced, expanded, and complexified for temporarily choosing any settings other than the “recommended” settings, that we know you don’t want].

Ah. There it is.

> > without having to navigate through multiple setup screens [which have been greatly enhanced, expanded, and complexified for temporarily choosing any settings other than the “recommended” settings, that we know you don’t want].

> Ah. There it is.

Don't forget the good ol' "users click next all the time" leaving all of the recommendations on: a single screen expedites the process!

"The recommended settings you want" is a wild turn of the phrase. Unless I want exactly what they're recommending, they can't possibly be both.

What's infuriating is that I wouldn't mind this process at all if they just made it something you can run by hand. I wouldn't even care if it added a highlight in the start menu to point it out. But constantly re-asking for things I've repeatedly declined is the very definition of harrassment.

Is there a registry setting that disables SCOOBE completely? If not, maybe a service that hard-kills it if it ever detects it runnning?

It’s in the Settings app. Search for “finish setting up” and uncheck the box.

> trying to trick you into enabling Microsoft services

Consider that “lucky” e.g. Apple re-enables Siri/Apple Intelligence every now and then without even asking.

What? Do you have source for that? I googled and didn't find anyone complaining about this.

every time you do an update large enough they do the welcome to mac and try and turn all that shit back on.

Yeah but you can opt out of everything, right? This is not "re-enables Siri/Apple Intelligence every now and then without even asking".

ah yes, but it’s once a year with the big version - but that’s not „secretly turning off” - it would be a serious issue if they turned on any settings themselves, and might end up with lawsuits and a loss of corporate clients

I use a Mac for work and pretty much any personal productivity stuff. Apple has its own problems but it's nowhere near as bad as Microsoft. I don't use Siri on my Mac but I've never cared if it's enabled cause it never makes you aware of itself unless you reach for it?

They do have the issue of the forced Apple Intelligence + giant model in Golden Gate and I think they're gonna be forced to let people disable that, if not only for enterprise customers that have policy restrictions on AI usage.

But again, none of this is as intrusive as my default browser suddenly being changed, or having my local files being uploaded to Microsoft's servers without me wanting it.

Disable OneDrive under the Task Manager -> Startup Apps. It's the first thing I did after doing a fresh install and I haven't had the OneDrive pop-ups ever.

MS Paint has broken in so many different ways since they started "improving" it. One big frustration is that the hit areas around selection handles are now oversized--probably because someone read about Fitts's Law. You can no longer move small selected regions because whenever your mouse is within a mile (seemingly) of a handle, it grabs the handle instead of the region.

> probably because someone read about Fitts's Law

probably for touch screens, like all the oversized, over-padded ui everywhere

Agreed. It is impossible to make an interface that works well for smaller screens with touch input, and larger screens with pointer input. You will always end up sacrificing information density and precision on the larger screen.

They should just have a manually selected touch mode. They are second class citizens and should be treated as such.

Or just have the interface autoscale itself like context menus on W10, if you trigger one with your mouse, it has compact mouse padding, if you trigger it with touch, it has bigger touch padding.

> They should just have a manually selected touch mode.

they did have Tablet mode, but it never went anywhere

Sure, but Windows knows I don't have a touchscreen but I do have a mouse and keyboard so there's no point in touch accommodation.

Even if you have a touchscreen, they should know what type of pointing device is being used to select something and the targets should adapt to that.

Well, there are separate events for touch input and mouse input on native software. You can actually handle both if you actually have time to hone that to perfection...

That's why I'm dreading the upcoming touchscreen MacBooks.

They already defaced macOS in Tahoe. It's a bit better in Golden Gate but still a massive regression that I only foresee getting worse as every UI will have to be built with "can this be used with someone's fat finger?"

I loved MS Paint on Windows 7. Perfect for small jobs.

i used to use mspaint for its lack of anti aliasing. Then they added it and wouldnt let you disable it.

Anyways, much happier now that I no longer use it.

If you cut from mspaint, open a new mspaint window and paste immediately, it'll incorrectly paste and mess up the image resolution and size.

One of the sillier regressions, which was thankfully fixed, was that the new Paint used to draw the marching ants animation around a selection regardless of whether the app was in the foreground. An instance of Paint with a rectangular selection would eat 5% of the GPU continuously in the background.

It's hard to imagine how the selection rotation demo shown could be less informative...

Because it's a shape rotation, not a selection rotation. I was confused for a minute too.

Oh jeez you're right. I thought they were taking a patch of yellow and rotating it on a yellow background that made no noticeable difference scaled down.

From the text blurb you can indeed also rotate selections but that demo is confusing since they used to rectangle shape tool which looks like the default selection tool most people are more familiar with.

(2026) in the title made me giggle

Interesting how they have kept MS-Paint as simple as Notepad for three decades, when they could have 'embraced, extended and extinguished' every photo editing application known to man during this time.

This could have been done like a classic OS calculator, with simple/scientific/financial UI variants, with simple/artworker/programmer modes. Programmer mode would be like the image processing toolkit VIPS (or Imagemagick), where you could batch process images without opening them, or, as per the article, rotate a 10K x 10K image by 0.02 degrees around any given x/y origin. Presumably 'artworker' mode would be somewhere between Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, with 'simple' being the MS-Paint that grandma can use to crop undesirables out of family photos.

Admittedly, this is not what an Operating System is about, however, over the years Microsoft have acquired and relinquished many a graphics application, including Softimage 3D and the Seadragon infinite zoom image viewer. It is almost as if they don't care.

why u just programming directly into a hn text box?

sounds like ur on a roll. i'd like for a command list along with a persistent data structure so i could retweak and reddit someone's project, parametrically

Paint.net has done Paint right for many years now...

> Please file feedback in Feedback Hub (WIN + F)

Wait, WIN + F is no longer for finding files?

I think they just want you to search with WIN.

Anyway I just use Everything by Voidtools[1] for file search because it works instantly and, well, actually works.

[1] https://www.voidtools.com/

As someone who likes drawing in MSPaint specifically, not really for nostalgic reasons, but because it's so pixel focused, and who hasn't liked a lot of the changes that have been made, this is a a functionality I think I can get behind.

I don't like when a program like this does antialiasing though.

Somebody in the Windows team must have realized that they can now vibecode all the missing features into MS Paint without having to dig into the legacy codebase themselves. New brushes, layers, and now rotation.

We all know where this is headed. Sooner or later, they're going to drag copilot into it.

I swear to god and I don't know why, but if they do that, that will be my final straw with Windows

I just use the local install of https://jspaint.app instead.

11/10, does exactly what I need it to do.

Apparently it's not your final straw because they did it almost 2 years ago

https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/micro...

They already did, there's a copilot button on the ribbon now

It sure why the downvotes. Given the number of photopea clones getting vibe coded there really is no excuse for paint to lack functionality found in ImageMagik 30 years ago

Or maybe they could leave it alone, and take the developers working on this and have them fix all the glaring issues in the OS and all of their shit online services. With all the vibe coded apps coming out, I think we can find alternatives to MS Paint easily enough.

>Given the number of photopea clones getting vibe coded there really is no excuse for paint to lack functionality found in ImageMagick 30 years ago

Oh, and hear me out: we have now enough bytes to allow unlimited number of syllables in haiku poems!

Isn't it neat? Now this comment can also be a haiku, and MS Paint can be Photoshop.

Yay progress!

I'm pretty sure Paint has been rewritten at least once, if not twice, since Windows 95. Windows 7's Paint was much more advanced, with far more options. The current one in Windows 11 definitely has a new UI, although the underlying code might be the same.

MS was playing the long game long before everyone else even knew they were in a game. Ha!

Show some mercy. The team that supports the poor thing has their OKRs too.

TiL MS-Paint.exe has a canary version.

Funnily enough, it was because of this missing feature that primary-school-me figured out that you can emulate rotation using the (somewhat inexplicably present) skew feature. Matt Parker did a video about it a few years ago too[1].

So am I saying this is needless bloat and Micro$oft have lost their ways? Yes! Back in my day we had to do it by hand -- the sheer entitlement (pun intended) to expect a computer to do computations for you. The children yearn for practical uses of trigonometry!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LCEiVDHJmc

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