Literally argued with a bunch of game-pass supporters on this very topic today, where we don't own shit anymore and everything is rental only. Sick of people gobbling corporate cock.
Tangentially related... I work IT in a CNC shop. Most engineering prints that we get to make parts to have various specs on them for materials and various finishes. Those specs used to be free years ago, but they've most all been replaced, but not really updated at all. Now everytime they have a revision change, we have to buy the new revision from SAE for like $70 a piece. As shitty as that already is, in recent years, they have DRM locked them to a single user. So while we have 50+ employees with multiple needing to reference these for quality inspection or processing, it's against the ToS to share those specs. We are supposed to buy one for each user which is fucking bogus.
Fuck em. I screen snip each page and make a new PDF, or that one user prints it out and scans it in. The extra kicker is that while that's not allowed, you can buy a paper copy that can be shared for the same cost, you just have to wait for it to be delivered.
Hey adobe, how about you stop contacting everyone in our organization using a single non-profit license of a single product and telling them we should all be on a single cloud account so we can pay several times more for the same thing just to get access to sharing services no one wants?
A friend of mine is about to be interested in digital photography and is soon going to commit on a photo finishing suite.
She already attended some courses and - of course - the mayority of those had users of and applications from Adobe, usually Lightroom and Co.
I know Adobe is scum (fuck Adobe), she knows Adobe is "bad".
I think I could steer her into free and/or open source or one-time-pay software but for this I have to have an alternative that is a viable substitute, especially to Lightroom.
As for alternatives I know of Darktable, Capture One, Affinity Photo and RawTherapee.
Any more recommendations? Or an opinion on these or other products?
Have you had a look at the Affinity suite? It certainly can't replace everything, but for many users like me it's not really missing anything for a one time payment.
Expensive as hell, it insists I use their insecure office add on “PDF Maker” but people around here find it worth $350 a year to be able to merge pdf’s from the context menu so I’m stuck trying to find ways to support it with out compromising the network. I hate the adobe suite
I literally just wanted to esign a document the other day, and in order to get the functionality I wanted ONE TIME, I had to create an account, give them my credit card info for a free trial, let Acrobat Reader download all the other functionality I didn't need, which took 10 minutes. The program crashed, buttons didn't work, it didn't save the first time.
I fucking hate Adobe.
What's a good PDF editor that does e-signatures that I don't have to pay a long-term subscription for? Foxit is nice, but requires a subscription.
This is exactly why I have been running the same Adobe software for the last, what, 15 years now? Whatever the last one was before they changed to a subscription model, that's the one I have.
While I often have to use Adobe stuff in my line of work (its unfortunately the industry standard) I made the decision a couple of years back that Adobe software isn't allowed to touch my personal devices. On the Mac, Creative Cloud is essentially malware. I use Affinity to replace photoshop and illustrator, while Apple Photos has been enough for me so far to replace Lightroom.
Hey chatGPT, what would Blackbeard have to say about Adobe licensing?
Adobe, be drivin' me to madness with their confusin' schemes. Ye need a map just to make sense of it all! They be chargin' a king's ransom for their software, and what do ye get in return? Aye, a license that's as flimsy as a ship's riggin' in a storm.
It's a never-endin' voyage through their terms and conditions, and I can't fathom their logic. It be like navigatin' the high seas with a broken compass. They be restrictin' the use of their software, demandin' we pay a ransom every month, and heaven forbid ye want to use it on multiple devices! They'll make ye walk the plank for that.
And don't get me started on their audits, me heartie. They be sendin' their parrots to check if ye be usin' their software properly, threatenin' to keelhaul ye if they find a single violation. It be daylight robbery, I tell ye!
I immediately switched to Affinity and haven't looked back. Yes, there is a learning curve and you will have to spend a few hours Googling how to do the same thing but it's easily been able to do the same thing that I was doing before.
The ONLY two features I miss from InDesign is GREP and scripts. Other than that, FUCK ADOBE.