I know this is silly, but is there a GNU replacement for mspaint?
I know GIMP exists, but it's not worth learning to use it. I have no artistic talent, so a very crude program is just fine for making crappy pictures.
For those not familiar, mspaint is a really rudimentary image editor for windows. The pictures you can make with it will generally look terrible, but there's almost no learning curve, and for me the barbaric quality is kind of endearing. For example, here's something I made in mspaint over two years ago, the kind of thing I'm looking to do:
GNU is an operating system. It doesn't make sense to talk about a "GNU replacement for mspaint".
On the topic of free/libre simplistic graphical programs, I use KolourPaint. There's also mtPaint, rgbPaint, GNU Paint (gpaint), and XPaint. All of these are in Trisquel's software repository.
I am aware that GNU is an operating system, I just meant a replacement compatible with GNU, under the assumption that you guys weren't going to recommend anything nonfree.
In any case, thanks to both of you!
If you kept your child soul, you can install Tux Paint too: http://tuxpaint.org
Anyway, it is more powerful than MS Paint!
"the barbaric quality is kind of endearing"
Haha I hear you. I used MS Paint to make a slide show for a school project once, many years ago. The backgrounds were photos; I wrote comments on the photos, in red, with the paint brush. The finished product looked pretty rudimentary. That counted as an artistic style, in my mind. It got some laughs in class, and my teacher liked the presentation.
Yes, and I think any sane person, not only you, know it ain't GIMP :)
Try gnome-paint, or gpaint.
Oh, and while I'm not writing for everybody here, I must say I'm more familiar with "GNU/Linux" as the OS' name, while GNU implies to me that it's the one with Hurd, or that you're talking about a GNU project.
xfig and dia are good alternatives. My teacher used them when he had to draw figures and diagrams on his books and presentations.
I have been thinking for a while that it would be nice to have a free/libre, cross-platform, exact 1:1 replica of XP-era MS Paint. Additional features (layers, tabs) could be toggled by a setting, but if you turn them off it would be exactly like MS Paint (except for non-intrusive features like unlimited undo).
I don't know if that would have legal problems, but it would be great for my sprite artist who is most comfortable with MS Paint right now. I feel like GIMP is not very good on Windows nor is it good for pixel art. There is Pinta, but that has a .NET dependency that I wasn't able to install on Windows somehow. There's Aseprite but I don't think they could compile it and she doesn't want to waste money in case she ends up preferring MS Paint anyway.
Have you tried KolourPaint, mtPaint, GNU Paint, or XPaint? All of these are perfectly suitable for pixel art and quite similar to MS Paint.
There's also one called GrafX2.
Thank you for telling me about these. I never heard of some of these and want to try them out. However, they all have some issues. XPaint seems to come closest to my dream application.
One of the biggest issues is with GNU paint and mtPaint: I am not aware of any active maintainance of these projects. This means that there is nobody to fix problems or add even minor features. You cannot go 6 years without any issues without updates.
The rest of these all look pretty great, but only KolourPaint runs on Windows. It looks pretty good to me. So, that is what I will go with for now. Thanks once again for telling me about these.
I use the non-GNU, but still free as in freedom Pinta for images and Xournal for pdfs when just simple and quick editing tools are enough.