1mo ago

Software companies HATE him!

Anti-Corporate Movement @lemmy.giftedmc.com

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106 comments

Rent-seeking can fuck right off.

Good. People need to stop renting software.
- I dunno, I still find m365 family a great deal. 5TB cloud storage for less then 100 euro a year? And get the best most complète Office suite as a bonus?
  If you compare that to the competition it's a slam dunk. I need cloud storage. I need an office suite.
  Same goes for prime here in NL by the way. Unlimited photo storage, free games monthly, streaming, Luna, free shipping for less then 6 euro.
  
  I dunno, the cloud storage part is quite easy to make at home. Granted, the initial price will be steeper (since you need to buy the physical drive). But in two years time, it will have paid for itself and your data will still be yours.
  As for the office suite, while I understand that MSOffice is advanced, for the regular user that I am, OnlyOffice is more than enough.
  
  Frequently paying any amount of money for anything will always seem like a good deal to anyone who always depends on others to do everything. There's no shame in needing each other, though. We should strive to be self sufficient but can't be skilled or resourceful in every field. Abusing the needs of others on the other hand... All these huge companies should burn to the ground for that.
  
  Just wanted to give an idea for pricing of a self hosted alternative:
  5-6TB drive is around 100 EUR
  Intel NUC as a server is around 200 EUR
  My personal power consumption is 6 kWh per month at 24/7 operation, here that costs 10 EUR per year
  You can chose other parts, you may already have some parts, Im giving my own example here.
  Keeping in mind you need to be a bit tech savy to set this up, keep it updated, data secure, things may break down the line and require maintenance, etc.. The upside: the data is yours, you are reliant on yourself, it can do more than just store files.
  But obviously: to each their own!
  
  Honest question, what does the current office suite does, or does better, that office 2013 doesn't?
  
  they are great deals til enough ppl sign up, get used to it and attached, then comes price gouging, it happened with adobe
  
  I really hope it's not like goog where if you ever want to download that data your download speeds are reduced to a crawl and everything about the download is convoluted.

CS6 represent! it has everything i need for my routine photo editing
- I lost my CS6 key a while ago. It was a sad day. Now I just find PS from alternative sources.

Newer versions of Krita now come with G'mic built in, which add so many incredible tools, including a content aware fill that works incredibly well, and a really nice edge detecting cropping tool called foreground extract.
- Shoot, krita has content aware now? Other than non-destructive editing/layer styles that's one of the big things keeping me on PS.
  It doesn't even need to be amazing, it just needs to be good enough. I think the weirdest thing about krita for me was how you type text in a dialog box instead of on the canvas.
  
  Adding text effects, like colored outlines, on Krita is painful, you essentially have to type <xml> stuff without a decent preview of how it looks
  
  AFAIK, krita has had non-destructive editing for a while now (while gimp just got it with the 3.0 release).
  The text tool is a pain point still, though thankfully a new from the ground up text tool over 6 years in the making is soon to be released for Krita this year, likely making it the most capable open-source option.
  Also @ICastFist@programming.dev

I've always been a fan of getpaint.net - it's like... idk, half-way between microsoft paint and photoshop, but you can install plugins to add functionality that the vanilla version doesn't offer.
- Until you cross into advanced manipulation or outright image creation, Paint.Net can do almost everything you want from it. Tbh the only feature I miss is the plethora of user guides and tutorials that are Photoshop specific, or said another way; I don’t miss their software, I miss the community

https://www.photopea.com/
- Awesome. It works on my phone too! Now I can Photoshop on the go!
- Honestly the best Photoshop alternative I found.
- I really wish there was a desktop version. The webapp starts to chug when the project gets anywhere near remotely-large.

I wonder how much different it really is from current versions.
- Up until they started adding AI features it's pretty similar. I'm ambivalent about those features. They're handy as hell, but the SaaS model eats dead donkey asshole, and they're tied together. I always find a client who will just pay for my CS subscription for me, so it's not really like I've suffered much, but what a stupid fucking tax just to get CA-delete.
  
  Content aware delete was in cs5
  
  The new mest features that i use the most at work are straighten when i have do do a wuick and dirty scan, and CA-fill when customers send me print files without bleed. But I don't have to pay for the Adobe subscription, and if it makes my boss happy, then i am happy
- I actually checked it out last year because I was curious about the whole AI autofill in Photoshop, where you can give it a cropped art piece and it'll fill out the remainder.
  If your experience with Photoshop is from CS5, you'll hate this new version. They removed a lot of the tooling that I was used to. Maybe they simplified the toolbar and everything is tucked into different things. I struggled to modify my art piece and remove the background.
  I found myself going back to Photopea immediately.
  As for the AI autofill thing? It's a shit gimmick. It barely works most of the time. And honestly, if I was to use a tool, you're better off using a AI art tool and then "Photoshop" them together. Then use whatever the hell Adobe cooked up.
  
  If you have a decent GPU, you can do “AI autofill” with something like InvokeAI or FluxTools locally (no cloud/account) and get really good results.
- After using CS6 since 2012, I finally found a proper working crack for CC (the 2024 version, specifically). The only difference I really noticed was the addition of the AI stuff (which I can't even use because it requires an Adobe account). There were other differences I've noticed too but they're so minor that other than HDR support, I can't think of any of them (and I can't even get HDR working in PS, despite having a 10 bit display).
  The jump from Premiere CS6 to CC 2024 was much more useful for me, but only because I needed support for more modern video codecs.
  
  I honestly think commercial software offerings peaked in around 2010, and that's why they're all seeking rent now. They realized nobody wants to buy an annual new copy for incremental updates, but they also wanted more profit, not less.
  There's still cool things happening in software, but now it's all incredibly niche, or FOSS projects that sometimes aren't all there yet, BUT do cool things that commercial software won't. Or incredibly niche FOSS projects.
- I'm still using CS5.1 Photoshop. I used a newer version about a year ago and short of a few things moved around, it was pretty much the same.
  Maybe there is some back end, under the trunk changes that make it more intelligent in how it does something, but I never noticed.
  For what I use it for, I don't foresee myself using anything else until it stops running.

I own the CS6 Master collection. I still play around in Flash builder on occasion and play my old animations. AE is still useful but has been mostly replaced by Blender. Still love Photoshop as I have been using it since my gave me a cracked copy of 7.0.
Have no intention of ever giving adobe another dollar.

I think Photoshop CS5 is still a better product than Gimp will ever be. I think this person needs to upgrade to Affinity. While it’s still available to buy, that is.
- I'm happy with affinity. Pity it doesn't run on limux
  
  Apparently there's a tutorial to make a thing in docker that actually does run it. It's a whole-ass process though and my friend who uses Linux for most stuff was working on it a while back. Damn shame it's not a thing, out of the box.
- But since I can easily install Gimp on my linux system it is clearly superior to any proprietary windows exclusive software. I'm so glad I never even bothered with Photoshop in the first place.

There's gimp, krita, inkscape
- Daw a circle in Gimp. I'll wait.
  
  I mean it took all of 30 seconds of having not used in it a few years to find the eclipse selection tool, force it to a circle and fill it with color. If you have a fancy tablet you could probably even put some patterns in it too but that is not a skill I have
  
  GIMP's focus isn't on drawing, but rather on manipulating photographs. If you want to be drawing circles easily, then Krita or Inkscape or any number of simple paint applications will do that...
  
  3.0 just dropped you can in fact draw a circle.. For circles, I prefer inkscape.
  
  Yeah they fixed that, apparently. I wouldn't know because I've never needed to draw a circle in gimp, but that was part of the big hubalu with 3.0.

Mac users should take a look at Pixelmator if you’re doing light work and Affinity if you’re doing studio-grade work.
Pixelmator feels like something Apple developed to be a part of the iWork suite, and the Affinity apps are literally Adobe apps with sane price points.
(Pixelmator was recently purchased by Apple so its future is uncertain, but the original software is still for sale as it was before the buyout for the time being.)
- I missed that news. So photomator is probably dead and going to be folded into photos.app.

Portable CS3 represent

I'm still using CS3. It's the only software on my pc at this point that doesn't have dark mode. I also found out recently that it should run perfectly on Linux using wine, so I intend to try that soon.
- One of us! One of us!

I can't believe they haven't released an "update" that breaks it.

I'm an artist, and I have that version too, running it under qemu/Win10 (it won't run on Wine), under my Debian-Testing main OS. However, I have actually moved to Gimp 3 recently for all my work. I use it to make collages ( https://www.instagram.com/eugenia_loli ) and edit my scanned watercolor paintings: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli The only problem is that Gimp can't read my old PSDs that have adjustment layers correctly, so I load them first either on that old Photoshop, or online on Photopea, and then export them as TIFFs, to load them back to Gimp. For my newer work, I just use Gimp all the way.
- Loli
  Uhh
  
  It's my real name :D
  
  I was expecting different art with that username
- Your work is really good! I particularly enjoyed the person in the bath tub with the ankle monitor and the mice sharing a clothesline between their plant houses.

I too still have the cracked installers for CS5 and CS6 but... I switched to Gimp and Krita a very long time ago.
I remember doing an animation internship on the pilot of a TV show most here have heard of (Not gonna dox myself) and CS5 was definitely available at the time, but the studio was still using Flash MX because that was the last version available that Adobe hadn't fuckin wrecked.
- Sup fellow film person (stunts here). I believe it. When creatives find something that works they tend to stick with it.

Let me know when we can download cars. For a friend.

I mean, if you buy software and expect 0 updates afterwards I guess that’s fair
- I mean honestly, the old model was kind of dope. You pay a fairly high price for the software. Updates for that version are free. When they come out with enough new features to release a new milestone version you got to choose whether you upgrade to the milestone or stay on your existing version. True critical security patches were released for At least the last couple of versions.
  But you get to decide when the features warrant you buying again. You got to choose with your wallet and the companies had to deal with that.
  If they would have put a bunch of crap in about having the rights to AI scrape all of your content in the old version people would have just said fuck it I'm not upgrading it. But as it stands, if you don't like it you have to not use the software at all.
- There often were updates and they were free...
- If you buy software at a version point, (vs the subscription model), why would you expect an update for it? Particularly for free? You chose to buy at a frozen point.
  
  Because it's beneficial for the software company's reputation. People are more likely to buy the software when they know that it's not going to get a permanently unpatched zero-day the moment the next version comes out.
  
  That model always had the tacit agreement that the company releases early, and the users accept that they are part of a large testing base with one or two major updates to come. Further to this, continued support in the early life drives more sales. There's a spectrum of users from bleeding edge to 4 versions behind. Some will hold out and never upgrade if key bugs remain, so updates make business sense. Software of this complexity has to be this way to strike a balance to move new features forward.
  
  In this day and age people expect security and operational patches. It’s hard work maintaining software, even if it is feature complete.

gimp and krita up in this bitch

I hadn't used my CS6 for years but recently needed Premiere Pro. I hauled out the discs, installed it using an external optical drive, and searched old Outlook PST files for the serial number. It installed on my Win 11 laptop, and it activated when I typed in the serial number.
Long live CS6! Adobe won't get any more money from me.
I did get lucky when I bought it, though. I ordered and paid for CS5.5 Education version, so that was about AUD$450 instead of AUD$2200, and what turned up was CS5.5, a free licenced copy of CS4 "to help with 32-bit to 64-bit transition" and a download code for CS6, as I'd ordered 5.5 after 6 had been announced. I ended up with licenced copies of CS4, CS5.5, and CS6 for AUD$450

Hell, I was still using PS6 on Win10 until I finally switched to Mint a few months ago. I had to reinstall it repeatedly but it still worked.

Krita seems like a good free open-source altherative.
- For illustration work at least. Photoshop is not the best for illustrations either, almost all illustration-focused apps easily blow it out of the water.
- Also works really well on my android tablet with a stylus.

I still have PSP9 on my PC.

GenP. You're welcome.

Krita works great for my occasional hobby project.

You still don't own it. You bought a license to use it; like almost any other piece of software. If it came on physical media, you also own the disk it came on, but not the software on the disk. That license may not expire, and they can't stop it working remotely or take your disk away, but it's still being "rented."
- Well that sounds effectively like ownership to me
  
  Unless you need to prove you own it in court.

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