> 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-up to enable OneDrive have the option to remind me in a week or a month), 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.

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.

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.

(2026) in the title made me giggle

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

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

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

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

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

TiL MS-Paint.exe has a canary version.

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.

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