Technology

It's also a major pain in the ass to do now. I forget how I did it last time, some fuck Adobe subreddit had a guide for it but it's so much more than just install and drop lolcrackorvirus.dll into the folder.

Ecosystems and collaboration. If you're already using Adobe for X and Y in your teams, it's cheaper to get a CC license; and as for collaboration Adobe files are proprietary (and tbh so are Affinity files) so it's harder to transition off of them. You can open .psd files in affinity, but wanting to export one will rasterize your text. And you can't even export a .ai file, sure you can do pdfs and that preserves vector information and layers, but that's just friction that businesses wouldn't want to deal with.

FOSS projects are often worth their salt

A lot of FOSS projects have succeeded in approximately this way. I think it can only be a matter of time until this happens even in this area.

Can recommend the Affinity suite for anyone looking for some good alternatives.

Darktable is alright for LightRoom replacement as well.

Have you tried https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP for a Photoshop themed GIMP?

Today I went to cancel the Adobe stock trial, and during this extensive cancellation process, they tried to score me on another package for a year, and when I checked, it didn’t include the product which I was fucking canceling… Which is just insane and ridiculous!

Hey I’m canceling this product.

Oh ok. You want to give us a bunch of money for more unrelated products?

There's also free and open source alternatives.

They keep buying up anything that's an alternative. They need Monopoly sanctions.

That's a level of trust I'm surprised that so many companies and governments are completely fine with.

Crowdstrike. 'Nuff said.

they said, linking to an LLM-generated song

They cannot change the terms of a license without reserving themselves the right to do so which would be a red flag, this is in reference to future sales of the license for this software.

I think, because most people who are actually relying on Adobe products (e.g. making money with them) are making way more than it costs (by several orders of magnitude) so they let themselves get slowly boiled because they still make money hand over fist.

Everytime there is a price increase, the discussion becomes: do we retrain x people, costing us y per person and reducing productivity for z months, or do we just take the L and pay a flat percent increase per seat and maintain productivity. The choice is almost always the second one because it's hard to predict how prices will increase in the future and the costs of retraining your staff.

The people not making money have no resources to stand up to Adobe, so they make noise because it's all they can do. Adobe ignores them because they don't generate a significant portion of their revenue.

If you are an employee for a company using Adobe products, it's likely you don't even care and you may not even be aware of the pricing scheme your company is following.

I also have to use it for work. I don't know if it's Adobe, or Windows 11, or a toxic combination of both, but not a single day goes by where I can just create without things randomly breaking. Illustrator stops letting me drag with the direct selection tool. Premiere switches to hotkeys as I'm typing text. InDesign...actually InDesign has been behaving.

But literally all the other Adobe apps will break AS I'M USING THEM - like, an action I've literally just done suddenly doesn't work or glitches out. A couple weeks ago Premiere and Photoshop would literally crash on open. The day before they were both fine.

I have Gimp, Inkscape, and KdenLive installed just in case.

Note that a lot of games on steam don't have any DRM, either. It's probable that if you have large library, a lot of your installed games will run without steam, if you go and start them from their exe.

So you can likely archive at least some of your steam games by simply keeping them installed, or even squirreling away the install folder somewhere.