Tux Paint

The devs have made an incredibly useful and fun tool for kids, but hampered it by ignoring some essential functionality. I had been recommending it to educator friends, but now I realize it was quite irresponsible of me. I cannot imagine a teacher running around managing this app in a classroom of kids. I’ve tinkered with this application for a few years now via Windows, Mac OS and Android, but never really delved into it until today. I just starting showing my kid how to use it on a new laptop, running Ubuntu. The app window opened comically small to start, but I found that there was no way to resize it. The only option was to minimize or close. I initially thought it was a bug, but after some minor digging, found that this is expected behavior across all platforms. There’s a way to set a different default window size, but this is done via a separate application called Tux Paint Config, or via editing a config file manually. I am writing this review in 2023, not 1993. or even 2003… This visual art making tool has been in development for 20 years, it has some very some innovative features, like stereo sound feedback… as you drag the paint brush across the screen you get audible feedback on the brush’s position… CRAZY COOL!… time and energy were put into this feature, yet the end user cannot adjust settings or resize the window from within the application. I’m sure there are some well thought out reasons for this among the Tux Paint devs, but egads … resizing a window has been a fundamental part of working within a GUI for decades. All that being said, the app is free, and usable with some digging. While you should never look at a gift horse in the mouth, understand that you may be spending time than you care to, researching how to do very basic things in tux paint… like resizing a window.