I hope it keeps its blazing-fast startup. I regularly used Paint instead of Photoshop on a system where I had both because Paint starts instantly but Photoshop took a bit.
I use photopea quite a bit for this reason. It's faster to open this in a web browser than it is to boot photoshop. The 1/3rd sidebar ad it loads is... a lot, but I'm amazed that I prefer that to a 30s boot time.
I am surprised how photopea can be so feature complete and still run on an ad supported model. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles or Photoshop but covers 99% of the use cases without having to keep paying for a subscription. I pay for Adobe's photography bundle but primarily for Lightroom; for any other image editing I just go to photopea.
I was just reflecting on why I fire up Paint more often than GIMP, and this is the reason. Especially when all I want to do is paste an image, add a small annotation, and copy it back out, there’s no tool as fast.
It is basically why i have KolourPaint installed on Linux and ready on a launch button despite having a bunch of other 2D image editing apps: it starts (almost[0]) instantly and is perfectly fine for cropping images, adding annotations, etc and then pasting it to imgur, discord, or whatever. The only thing missing is having a tool to draw shapes like arrows (not something the Win9x era MS Paint, which is what KolourPaint replicates, had, but it would be a useful feature IMO).
[0] it takes somewhere between half to a second, there is a visible delay between double click and the window appearing but i can live with that. I'm not using KDE as my DE, it is possible it'd start instantly if i already had the KDE libs in memory.
Yes, except (unless I'm mistaken) the snipping tool can't add text and it can't draw boxes, which are two of the core use cases of screenshot annotation.