At this point I consider the Adobe suite to be basically the same as malware. Their apps seem to want to take over your system, install all kinds of "helpers" that run in the background constantly doing god knows what, etc. And their security record is terrible.
It's a shame because as someone who has a lot of interest in design, photography, etc. I acknowledge that they create some very powerful tools. I still miss Lightroom. But I'm just not willing to give them this much control over my computing environment any longer.
Yes, Creative Cloud also vomits a bunch of random stuff everywhere. Right now I can see 5 launchagent/launchdaemons just from having Photoshop and Illustrator installed, which seems insane lol
I stopped using Lightroom because it seems to want to modify the Windows Explorer to have a Creative Cloud section and their background software constantly pops up to tell you that it still exists.
What's nice about their subscription model is that there is no sunk cost when giving up. It's $5/month and you just stop paying it.
(I switched to Affinity Photo for editing but never found anything I liked for organization/library management. I just copy files around now. It ends up being OK because about 50% of my photos are from my phone, 25% are from a DSLR, and 25% are from film scans. Lightroom never helped me with phone or scanned photos, really, so I didn't give much up. Would still like some central self-hosted photo collector, though. Maybe Perkeep is what I want.)
> What's nice about their subscription model is that there is no sunk cost when giving up. It's $5/month and you just stop paying it.
Don't they try to get you to make a year commitment? I remember spending about 30 minutes with someone at Adobe getting them to cancel it when Lightroom was too slow to use on my Mac at the time (which had been more than fast enough for Aperture). After the second or third time that I told them I wasn't going to buy a new computer just for the privilege of running their software, they agreed not to charge a hefty early termination fee.
Yes, I had to pay a fee equal to 50% of the remaining year contract. I will no longer receive PSDs directly from designers, so the designers must now to export stuff to web spec so I can work with it outside adobe.
I've not tried for several years, but it was never that great at doing that. Last time I had to do this, I gave up and bought a photoshop subscription. Has it improved now?
Thanks for the tip! I took a look, and it turns out Affinity Photo is 50% off right now. So, a one-time $25 purchase (via App Store for family sharing)! And it handles PSDs. And the iPad version is $10. Adobe is toast.
I really, really wish that was the case, but there's no competition for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
Even after years of destroying their software with cloud crap, useless home screens, changing 30 years of muscle memory just because, all while adding a WebKit and Node.js instance for every new dialog box…
Affinity is definitely a step in the right direction. The Photo/Designer/Publisher combo holds its own and the iPad apps are pretty slick. It would be nice if they added something similar to Data Merge in InDesign, but for the most part, you can pretty much accomplish a lot of the same things for a fraction of the cost. And it's really not that big of a switch, considering a good swath of the market had to make the switch from PageMaker/Quark/Freehand/whatever as Adobe gobbled up the desktop market. It's similar to what Adobe did to the workstation suites 30 years ago.
"No competition" -- for some users, for now, maybe. (Speaking as someone doing web-related UI for a living since the late 90's, and using tools for digital art since the 80's.)
QuarXPress thought they owned the market and then they started taking advantage of their users. Same goes for Adobe. The resentment is building up. Once there's a viable alternative people will quickly switch and never look back.
It took many years and millions, being bundled with the rest of the Adobe suite and, perhaps most importantly, the arrival of OS X and Quark’s inability to migrate to it, for InDesign to displace Quark. And let’s not forget that Adobe had years of experience with PageMaker.
Hell, I remember 2003-2005 and being _excited_ to switch to InDesign. I think the issue pro software has is that at some point it's basically "done", with only small updates still required, yet the developers of said pro software need to make their sales numbers.
I'd be fine with cloud subscription software if the TCO ended up being lower than buying a boxed product, but it's seemingly more expensive than it ever was. $10USD/mo doesn't seem bad, but if you're comparing to a two-year, $200 upgrade price, then you're spending $40 more and can't opt to skip the latest menu reshuffle.
I don't even want to use it but the client passes me a PSD which I have to open accurately.
Photoshop puts like 5 folders in Utilities folder for no reason in macOS and runs bunch of daemons (which apparently can be a cause of bad vulnerabilities) and is dog slow in performance compared to a modern alternative like Affinity Photo.
Market dominance surely puts customer satisfaction to the end of the line.
For Photoshop, a big part of it is inertia. Companies worked with PS for years, and changing costs money. So students are taught what they’ll use (which is PS), and the cycle continues.
I have 2 licenses for affinity photo, Mac and Windows. But when I actually needed to get work done for a project, at least for my particular needs, I ended up going back to Photoshop.
It was a small thing. With Photoshop I can open a .PNG or .JPG file, edit, and pick Save (cmd-s/ctrl-s) and it saves back to the .PNG/.JPG. If I added layers or something I can press Ctrl/Cmd-Shfit-E to merge it all down then Cmd/Ctrl-S. This means the workflow is fast.
Affinity has no such workflow. You can open a .JPG but you have to follow the export workflow to save back to .JPG which is tedious.
I had say 150 files to edit. I reasoned my time was worth more than $120 to pay for a current version of Photoshop than to put up with a slow workflow.
I also recently tried to use Affinity's batch processing features but they aren't ask good as Photoshop's. I think they are trying to be helpful in that they scan all the photos before you start so you can see what they are going to operate on before you pick "Go". Unfortunately that's not actually a good flow if you're going to process 100s or 1000s of files. Instead of getting stuff done you have to wait for Affinity for several minutes while it goes and makes a thumbnail of all 100 or 1000+ images just so you can then click "Ok, do it!"
There are other ways to automate workflow that don't require the tool to do everything for you. IMHO, limiting yourself to what Photoshop can do is a trap, eg "export for web" which doesn't come close to generating production-ready assets. Given a need for workflow automation that's external to the editor, I feel it makes more sense to compose a workflow from tools that follow a less monolithic, more unix-y "do one thing well", kind of approach. But use cases abound. YMMV.
Try DarkTable and RawTherapee. Both of these options are pretty decent open source alternatives to Lightroom for the majority of basic workflows and common cameras.
I'd say they both are more than adequate, and allow for some pretty advanced workflows, since they expose a lot more tools with more fine-grained control than Lightroom.
For anyone who tries these programs, many of their developers and users hang out at https://discuss.pixls.us/
I've found DigiKam to be the most fully featured of the photo managers I've used. It even does facial recognition on your local box w/o sharing your data like most of the cloud hosted options. I'm not in love with the UI/workow but it works and can be installed on most OS I think.
Absolutely this. I'm a very casual user and this is the main point why I'm thinking of getting rid of photoshop. Great tool for whenever I'm in the mood for some drawing but my god does it make me nervous about my security and privacy.
The rumour a decade ago was that Adobe was the biggest producer of Adobe cracks. The idea was that it'd get people using it for free so it was the goto tool and then they could slam anyone using it commercially.
They can be still efective. Even a simple scheme may prevent a corporate user misusing some 30 day trial over and over and instead go through the trouble of getting proper license.
Yes, it's probably worth it to get a simple scheme for corporate users only. But Photoshop's protection isn't simple, but it is so widely cracked that in third world countries with limited internet access there are wandering sellers with DVDs of cracked Photoshop for 2-3$ (!)
I’m not finding much searching around either. I probably have an old spinning rust drive somewhere with the files still on them. This was somewhere around the CS5 or CS6 days, pre-subscription model.
From memory, in addition to sticking some pseudo-randomly named files in /System/Library, /Library, and -/Library, it would place a file in the root directory of all hfs+ volumes with xattrs set to hide and write-protect the file. Installers would then look for these files to check licensing status.
At the time, this was a fairly common trick with pro/prosumer proprietary software.
I believe on Windows the FlexNet DRM they use(d?) would overwrite Sector 32 and/or sometimes other nearby ones [0], which broke a fair few people’s GRUB2 bootloader installs as well as TrueCrypt as Flexera apparently didn’t check to see if it was in use for something else first.
This past week mine has started doing something even more fun on Windows 10: creating "WpSystem" folders on the root of all of my secondary hard drives and putting AppData>Local>Packages>Adobe.CC folders inside of them with a bunch of Internet Explorer and other dump files in it.
Stuff like this is why I'm still hanging on to my old Photoshop CS3. Some of the newer features are cool, but my needs are pretty basic and haven't really changed in the time CS3 has existed.
Sadly with OS upgrades that's often not possible. I suspect CS3 runs on Windows but with Apple's aggressive removing support for old features you can no longer run CS6 on MacOS AFAIK.
I only run their software in a Windows VM since it installs background services (AAMUpdater, AdobeGCClient) that don't go away even after uninstalling and using their cleanup tool. Not to mention the terrible cloud integration that hangs Chrome after trying to rebuild the font cache out of nowhere.
It's pretty much spyware behavior at this point. Like with certain video games DRM, Adobe software is one of those cases where the pirated version is actually better than the paid one.
I always really liked the idea of Sandboxie (https://www.sandboxie.com/) where you can run any and every application in its own sandbox, but I was never convinced that its security was as strong as it promised to be. I wish MS would implement something like this.
You do not want to run such things in an XP VM if you can help it. XP is such a hot mess security wise that flaws in it allowed attackers to break VM sandboxing more than once.
On the Mac, by default, Creative Cloud has an option enabled that indicates it will sync your entire home directory to their cloud storage service! I don’t think it actually does that, because I couldn’t see any of my files when I accessed their cloud storage product via their website, but what in the actual fuck.
The "Folder Location" option determines the parent directory where the "Creative Cloud Files" folder is stored, which is the actual sync folder. You can verify this by creating an empty directory and moving the sync location there. Bad, alarming UI though.
Wow, I’ll have to double check my system when I get home, that’s horrible.
I’ve been meaning to get out of the adobe photo software ecosystem, maybe this weekend is the time to find the right alternatives. Save a few bucks per month too.
just in case you didn't see below, this is for you to choose the location of your CC Files Sync folder. Not that it's syncing your hard drive to the cloud. the label is unclear, and I've filed feedback with the team to update the string.
While I've got your ear: the software update process is insane. It constantly notifies me about updates even though I dismiss the notifications (I'm not a frequent user, so I really don't care about updates much). Then, after I finally update Illustrator (the only CS app I use), I try to close the Creative Cloud app, but it asks me to confirm because there are pending installations. But I've double checked and there aren't! And then I get another notification letting me know that the updates are finished!
this is something we're definitely working on, there's a few things going on at the same time.
1. The CC app itself gets updates. If you're a purely Illustrator user you might not notice (or use! which is ok!) the features we've added, but it now has the ability to add custom fonts to your Adobe account, we've added new tutorials, and community features, support for CC Libraries, and a new unified search. One of these new features is notifications, which is #2.
2. Our notifications can be a little noisy, especially if you're not a frequent user. In the Creative Cloud app, you should see under Preferences > Notifications, the ability to select which notifications you want. So, if you want to disable App update notifications, you can.
3. On top of the features, there are some update/sync processes that go on in the background that won't function. Our current messaging just says "pending installations" which doesn't cover it all and we've heard a lot of feedback from users internally and externally about it. We're going to make that message more tailored to anything that's actively going on, and if there's nothing, allow you to close the app silently. To double check that nothing is actively installing, you can check the cloud icon in the top right to confirm. If there's nothing there, you can close it with confidence that it isn't installing an update.
Hope to get these enhancements out to our user base soon. Thanks for your feedback! Please note, we do actively track anything we see on our User Voice (http://creativecloud.uservoice.com) and try to engage on social media, in case you'd like to keep giving us more feedback outside of HN. Thank you!
1) Words can't adequately explain how little I care about Creative Cloud. I would really appreciate it if Adobe's stuff only ran on my machine when I was actually using one of the tools.
2) See above
3) Again, see above. I don't want anything to work in the background.
It re-iterate what nikanj said, agreed. I have absolutely zero use for Creative Cloud. Wish I could run without it. Wish Photoshop and Lightroom would at most check for updates when run instead of some constant processes.
Haha, its as if they took the legendary Adobe greentext story literally and took the effort to automatically update the entire beast constantly! For anyone not familiar with the great story: https://imgur.com/gallery/iJD8f
Great. Maybe you can explain why "Adobe Desktop Service" needs 2.16GB of memory wired with no Adobe products running (including the Creative Cloud app) and sync turned off.
Open Creative Cloud app. Click Preferences, then Syncing. Folder Location = “/Users/toasterlovin”. That, to me, indicates that it will try and sync that folder.
Ah, no. I see your point, this is as a fellow poster indicated, the location for your Creative Cloud Files folder. I will check with the team to see if we can make the language clearer.
Thanks for being so responsive. This is a truly alarming UI.
While you're at it, please ask the user whether he wants to sync at all during installation. By default it should not sync.
I only have Creative Cloud installed because I am a Lightroom and Photoshop user. I use the sync feature in Lightroom but do not need another generic file system cloud sync.
"Folder Location" = "location where a folder will go." Like when choosing where to unzip something, or where to create a new library bundle in Photos/Music.
Because, like every other sync solution out there, though for what reason I don't know, it fears the consequences if you are allowed to name the sync folder yourself.
Not perfectly analogous to specifying folder names yourself, but the infamous Steam deletion bug comes to mind. (https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671) Caused by a failure to use readlink (plus not sanity checking variable contents), so introducing a symlink would break it.
50% off each product (one-time purchase with updates, no subscription) too during the COVID pandemic.
Won't take you long to adjust at all as they're very similar and the apps are more lightweight and faster than Adobe's products have ever been. Also iPad versions if you want to edit on a tablet.
Been using Affinity Photo for a while now as an alternative to Photoshop and wouldn't look back.
I’ve used Affinity Designer as a cheap alternative to Illustrator. Not surprisingly it’s way better than Inkscape (the Inkscape UI alone makes me lose all interests in designing anything), but Illustrator definitely has a lot more features and power tools, and arguably more importantly, a hell lot more online resources. So I guess Affinity Designer fulfills the role as a budget alternative, but not much more.
I've always wondered why the space of professional graphics programs isn't like the space of professional DAW (audio) programs. With DAWs, everything is a standardized plugin (a VST) that can be run inside any of the workstation programs. Customers can buy VSTs separately from any consideration of what ecosystem they're going to be using them with.
Because only now are viable professional alternatives to Adobe programs starting to show up. Adobe would be shooting themselves in the foot by working with some interoperable plugin format. Also, for graphic design at least, plugins are a much smaller part of your workflow than they are in audio production— the basic tools really are the most important thing in design. I'd say most professional graphic designers, if absolutely necessary, could replace their entire digital workflow with a few hundred dollars in art supplies, maybe minus typesetting and color matching functionality, and likely produce more interesting (if much slower and less polished) results. I don't even think they make Letraset letters anymore.
That's very true! Although, I don't think it used to be true; there used to be several different, incompatible font systems. There were many simple bitmap-font formats for operating systems/display protocols (Windows, MacOS, and X11 all had their own); and then there were more complex, vector font formats, originally designed for printers to use internally, but then extended to computers through desktop-publishing software (e.g. Adobe Type1, Apple TrueType.)
If you think about it, much of the original point of desktop-publishing software, back when OSes could only natively use bitmap fonts, was that desktop-publishing software could do WYSIWYG layout and preview-rendering for vector-font "instructions" (e.g. PostScript.) Fonts were indeed a lot like VSTs!
I have no experience with graphic design programs, but I would guess that it has something to do with the fact that VSTs are self contained and have extremely simple interfaces. A VST takes some input (MIDI or audio) and produces some output (MIDI or audio). That's it. They're extremely modular, and you can chain them together in arbitrary ways so long as the inputs/outputs line up.
I imagine it's not so simple in the graphic design world, and without such a simple interface that everyone can agree on, it's much harder to create standardized plugins that everyone can use.
I lost my adobe license from my old job and gave designer a go. For my purposes, I’ve found it to be a superior solution. Runs faster, and basically the same shortcuts.
I needed to do some water color recently. Corel Painter blew my mind. The interface looks a little outdated but the brush styles and effects out of the box are just a joy to use.
Have you checked out Adobe Fresco? It's a free app that works for iPad and Windows, and let's you draw/paint in Fresco and use that same document in Photoshop
I am looking to replace Adobe because 50 USD per month is quite a number. I prefer one time price like Affinity. Too bad they don't have replacement for Premiere Pro and After Effects. For now I'm stuck in Adobe's purgatory.
I tried both. Pixelmator lacked (or I couldn’t find) vector tools I was looking for at the time, then the trial expired. That pushed me to Affinity and I had less trouble. Take this with a grain of salt, but vector work feels like a bit of an afterthought with Pixelmator.
What level of bug would it take for you to believe that a company is inept and bug reporting to be a waste of time?
For example if I was selling lemonade, you bought some and when you tried to drink it, you discovered sand instead of lemonade, would you come back to my lemonade stand and report a bug in my lemonade making abilities?
By the way, no refunds, you keep the sand. Legit lemonade business right?
Know any Premiere Pro alternatives? I know nothing about videos except we pay $70 a month and Premiere Pro still can't edit our older iPhone videos because they were filmed without a certain compatibility setting turned on for the phone.
We have to run an older (years older) Premiere Pro on our Macbook that somehow can edit them without any issues at all, with a newer up-to-date version on our much faster PC for recent videos. We've tried transcoding and various things like using an older version on Windows, but nothing else seems to work.
Then the other day I had to stay up until 3am because a video being edited just stopped saving with an uncaught exception and no useful information on both versions. I finally figured out that some effects like loudness and reverb control applied to the sound channel had become corrupted (after noticing it would save with sound off, then fiddling with the clips for another 2 hours having no idea what I'm doing).
Ever since the Flash days I've been wary of their software quality. Paying over $800 per year is fair if you're earning money and the stuff just works, but they don't seem to be holding up their end of the bargain.
However, if you don't need the absolutely full array of switches available in FFmpeg, Ive used the fork FFmbc to get into standard broadcast formats with easy presets:
Thanks, I've heard of DaVinci Resolve and found out shortly after commenting that there is a free version. We should give it a try.
I've got ffmpeg and Handbrake for transcoding but for some reason they both caused issues in Premiere Pro still (audio sync, choppy/repeating footage, etc) on those files. I'm not very experienced, so that might be on me, but it didn't seem to happen outside of Premiere Pro.
I just made the switch for exactly this reason! Still getting the hang of the UI but seems promising so far. I shoot with Fuji cameras which seem well-supported here.
a bit off-topic, but would you have any interest in a barely-used FUJIFILM XF 80mm f/2.8 R LM OIS WR Macro. and also a FUJIFILM XF 1.4x TC WR Teleconverter.
my Fujifilm XT2 was stolen during a trip to Europe last year and i've switched back to Nikon since the battery life of the mirrorless was disappointing (due to the EVF).
now i have some Fujinon macro glass collecting dust as rather expensive paperweights :(
I learned on Darktable as an amateur using Youtube tutorials and absolutely love it. I really "get" the concept of the digital darkroom now, and I love the conscious effort of "developing" my photos.
For just a free, straight-forward, full-featured PDF reader/viewer/text-finder I've been a long time user of Foxit Reader: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/
It's a mature product at this point and have had a good experience for years now.
I haven't used it on Mac, but PDF Expert[1] from Readdle has been great on my iPad - I use it to both read and edit PDFs. It's fast and the UI is intuitive.
Just tried it. PDF Expert would not display the government fillable forms that Preview also will not display.
The app offered to convert the PDFs if I would email them to PDF Expert, and suggested Adobe products as an alternative. Nice try, but Foxit displayed the PDFs and allowed me to fill in the fields.
I still routinely encounter fillable forms that Preview.app can't handle, particularly with checkboxes or large text areas. It also frequently uses the wrong font in PDF forms meaning text doesn't fit in the prescribed form fields.
That doesn't work for sites that then process filled PDF forms, unfortunately. And it incredibly time consuming for some forms that have dozens or more of checkboxes and fields to fill in.
Does Foxit work for those and other edge cases? I've used Preview.app for years and only the past few months have encountered incompatible PDFs. I reluctantly downloaded Acrobat Reader. The PDF required a signature and locked the document for editing...that was annoying and not completely obvious.
Just tried it. Foxit works with the fillable government forms that I have not been able to read for months because Preview won't display them.
I agonized about installing Acrobat Reader, but Suspicious Package says it wants to run 88 install scripts. I don't feel like tracking down that much malware when I uninstall it after filling out a form.
My use case is making lots of highlights in textbook PDFs and I usually can't highlight for long before it beachballs. PDF Expert is a huge upgrade in this respect.
Readdle just needs to add exact phrase searching/finding; then it'll be wholly better than Preview imo.
The problem with PDF is that it's a bag of needles disguised as a piece of paper. Most of the time people expect a PDF to be a document, not a Form, Rich Media, Contract, Javascript, or any of the other crap it can do. All that extra crap dramatically increases the attack surface area of Acrobat or any other PDF reader that supports it.
At least the PDF reader in Firefox is a Javascript App that runs in a Browser sandbox and doesn't support 99% of the crap a PDF can do.
On Windows this can easily be remedied in the options accessible via the taskbar. I always turn this off and tell it to show the full window titles instead of just the icons. Windows are not browser tabs, I don't ever have enough of them open to need that stacking behaviour.
But do they remember your position in the PDF between restarts? I some times read books or lecture notes in PDF format, and dedicated programs works much better for that than the support in browsers
Safari "supports PDF", but not well. The PDF viewer is run in an extremely janky view that clearly has not been updated in years. It runs out-of-process, but takes little advantage of the many advances in XPC rendering that have come in recent years; as such it cannot handle looking up services correctly, or vibrancy, or even have Retina support for its UI. And those are just visual: the PDF support itself is shoddy; it's unable to do many things that other browsers can do out-of-the-box (forms?), searching for text has been broken for the better part of a year. It's an obvious rough spot in Safari's otherwise polished interface.
Fair criticism. I guess my bar for what I define as "good PDF support" is much lower than yours - I only generally read them or plug in a digital signature when signing my lease.
Personally, I am loath to download documents. I actually like what iOS Safari does, which is run the generic document previewer on files inside the app itself. I hate clicking on a link on my computer and then getting a PPTX that I have to open in PowerPoint.
I feel exactly the same and I totally depend on Lightroom and Premiere/AE/Audition for making a living. I would _never_ install their suite outside my editing machines.
Creative Cloud is also spyware, transmitting and uploading your logs and activity within the apps silently and without your consent. I use Little Snitch and deny them almost all network access after the first ten minutes they are installed/activated. It’s a big patchwork of stuff, much of it running as admin, including node and other stuff. I don’t trust it at all, and would have a dedicated machine or VM for it if it were practical.
Hopefully I can move to the KDE video editor for NLE, and Pixelmator is already better than Photoshop IMO. The only other two I need to replace are Lightroom and After Effects. I think the latter will be hard/impossible.
A workaround is to use LittleSnitch (or Windows Firewall Control if on Windows) and block everything Adobe except what you actually need.
No freaking app should ever be given this much or any control over a user computer. Every app (except system maintenance tools and other apps which genuinely need full access to fulfill their very purpose) should be constrained within a directory meant right for it + the files the user wants them to open.
CPU usage goes up in case of blocking, be caerful when on battery. I tried to remove adobe background services crap (or disabling it via services.msc) when used adobe apps on windows.
That kinda stuff runs well in a VM. Not too GPU dependent, so you generally get very-near-native performance. The only problem I end up having is constantly blowing away my VMs, racking up too many new installs, and running afoul of key limits.
Have you seen qubes os? [1] Obviously this would not work on OS X, but the concept is fascinating and definitely a different and unique approach at security and isolation.
Qubes is great but be careful... I tried giving a specific usb port to a windows vm to play games with a joystick and accidentally gave all of my USB inputs to it, effectively locking myself out of dom0. Oops.
I wanted to try running in a VM and actually have not considered believing bad performance. How is performance degradation - is it very very noticeable?
With the virtualization primitives in modern CPUs it's like 95%+ of native. GPUs are a total lost cause though, so you won't be playing games (unless you do GPU passthrough).
As someone who works in film production I am so done with adobe creative cloud. I use FCPX because I can’t stand how inefficient adobe is on a Mac. It grinds your processor for no reason and renders at half the speed it should. After effects is way better than Motion but it’s just not worth it. I spent $300 in 2011 and FCPX has been flawless (well...after they fixed that first year or so of problems haha). With FCPX having a one time payment and davinci resolve being free, I just can’t justify adobe’s relatively expensive monthly payments when it’s so inefficient and insecure. And the updates! Jesus christ.
Years ago (pre cloud - master collection) I was on Windows and made the switch to Mac with a written guarantee that the apps (I used Flash a lot) would have the same functionality. It turns out that the ability to zoom in with the mouse was crippled and they removed .eps output ability. They continuously removed output formats (eg at least FXG allowed some format interchange until it too was taken away). So, workflows had to be abandoned.
Amusing to think about how used to terrible Adobe 0day people are. Zoom has some stumbles and the tech giants seize in the opportunity to promote their solutions. Adobe? More 0day? Just another day at the office.
I used Photoshop for digital painting but wilfully ditched it when I got a new laptop and decided to install Mint on it instead of staying with Windows 10. Then I discovered Krita, which is a linux based open source illustration program which works just as well and I don't have to worry about Adobe eating up half my memory on useless background processes I don't need nor want.
It's a shame because as someone who has a lot of interest in design, photography, etc. I acknowledge that they create some very powerful tools. I still miss Lightroom. But I'm just not willing to give them this much control over my computing environment any longer.