I remember when I was doing pixel art, there were some purists that insisted that using layers and transparency/opacity to create windows for your buildings is more or less cheating. According to them, one should manually figure out what the color palette should be for things seen through a window.

Anyway, I continued using layers and transparency/opacity. Pixel art was hard enough already for me, so I didn’t feel that it made sense to artificially make it even more difficult for myself at the time. I had enough other aspects of pixel art to work out already in order to try to get better at it.

But is Windows 11 paint capable of pixel art? I'm reading that it antialiases everything.

You can draw single pixels. I'm not sure where whoever told you that got it from.

But can you resize without antialiasing, and does pasting trigger antialiasing?

There's this https://www.windowsphoneinfo.com/threads/why-does-resizing-m... (made confusing by the next person talking about Paint 3D, a different application) and this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3991946/... (made confusing by the person being an artist and talking in peanut butter metaphors).

I can't reproduce any of those issues. When drawing the indicator snaps to a pixel, so it's perfectly clear where it's going. When I draw a line, it's pixel-perfect when moving the control points, likewise after it finalises. And when I copy a section of the image and paste it back in, it's pixel-perfect as I move and when I finalise. There doesn't seem to be a true resize; all I seem to be able to do is change the size of the canvas, which doesn't add any kind of aliasing.

But I've only used the program for less than 5 minutes, so maybe it's configured differently?

Yes, resizing within Paint preserves pixel-level color. I just resized a single pixel dot to about 14x25 without aliasing.

I don't know why you are so concerned, but it's incredibly easy to test these questions if you really want to know.

And create single-pixel images. My most used application of Paint by far is creating single-pixel PNG files to work around the fact that "solid color" is not an option for lock/login screen backgrounds.

XP era mspaint with layers is really all I want. Rudimentary image editing and drawing but with layers.

Add threshold select (magic wand), and I'll agree 100%.

They should have just hired the paint.net guy and rolled it in.

The point of paint is a tiny pixel editor. If you want layers there are better programs.