this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Futurology
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Not sure I consider this futurology, but I definitely consider people that willingly use Adobe products silly.
Are there viable alternatives for their products?
There’s some in this giant list of free alternative software / web services to popular paid ones https://slrpnk.net/post/10162152
This is a fantastic list! Thank you for sending it my way. Saved for later exploration and I commented with my latest free (though only partially open source) app suggestion.
Yes, though for certain things, Adobe products are the industry standard and there's no way to escape that. For others, it just requires learning new apps. There was a great discussion about GIMP the other day for example.
Has GIMP improved much in the last five years?
My partner uses Adobe products for one of his jobs, and he had installed their cloud software on one of my laptops on his user account. Which forced it on all other user accounts, too.
I found that it installed horribly challenging to kill or remove daemons that would relaunch and reinstall their spyware bullshit if you didn't kill all of them in the right way, and it was spamming me a pop-up asking for my password to install other things, which I couldn't prevent.
I was able to stop it after many attempts and then got my partner to uninstall that junk from my laptop.
That was all still more user-friendly than the last time I tried to use GIMP.
No, not much. I use GIMP and Inkscape occasionally for simple things like quick and dirty mock-ups, changing backgrounds, and adding transparency. They're good enough for that. I'd bet a professional could learn to become efficient at using GIMP, but I don't think it's as intuitive or feature-rich as Photoshop.
Drats. I give it a go every handful of years because I want it to be great, but that's my experience every time, too.
I still hold out hopes, since Blender used to be the same way. When I last tried Blender, their keyboard shortcuts and scene navigation were clearly developed by someone who thinks that using emacs is a good idea, and that vi never should have been improved.
But they're a serious pro tool now that has a foothold in the 3D industry which I would not have predicted back then.
I started using GIMP just before Adobe Creative Cloud came to fruition, so I'm biased. I found things frustrating and hard at first, but I switched to Linux and had no choice but to learn. I don't doubt that it could be better in many ways, but most criticisms I read about GIMP are that it doesn't do things the way Adobe Photoshop does.
I like FireAlpaca, myself
I'll have to check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!
Affinity Suite.
But they have recently been purchased by a different company, so everyone's waiting to see how that pans out.
Gimp is good for begginer/pre-amateurs, but the core of it is rotten and not fit for any serious work with color.