
“Run from Adobe Creative Cloud” - martinml
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/diuq69/run_from_adobe_creative_cloud/
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Mobius01
Serif’s Affinity suíte of products is by far the most credible competition and
suitable replacement for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Anyone
dissatisfied with Adobe (you should be) ought to consider these alternatives.
They’re polished, well supported, have received a constant stream of quality
feature enhancements, and are traditionally licensed.

They won’t work for everybody, but there is a large cohort of Adobe users out
there that could instantly substitute their software with minimal effort and
get out this absurd predicament.

~~~
modernerd
The challenge with the alternatives is that they don’t always open Adobe
files. (Last time I checked Affinity Publisher opened PDFs but not InDesign
files, for example.)

This means that:

1\. You can’t always open your existing work and may have to recreate it.

2\. If you work with other agencies or freelancers who use Adobe products you
then have to explain that you can’t open their “industry standard” files.

These are very real problems for those in industry making regular tweaks to
files and sharing them with other agencies, printers, and freelancers. I spent
2 years as a graphic designer and the studio managers would not switch to
alternatives I showed them even though they complained bitterly every time
they had to add a new seat to their Adobe subscription.

It would be great if more people used a wider range of Adobe alternatives,
though, because it would help to cement the idea that Adobe is not some open
standard; it is only embedded in industry by inertia.

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folkhack
Yeah - they're horrid. My last experience with them was that they couldn't
bill a _perfectly_ valid credit card (tested multiple times at other places
during the issue with zero problems). NO idea why... called multiple times to
sit on hold and hear "it's fixed!" only to receive a billing failed
notification two days later. I let it lapse and now they're not getting $60/mo
from me - tough cookie for them I guess.

After wasting over 1-2 hours of my time on hold/with customer support people
who could care less I just figured it wasn't worth throwing my money at them
anymore if they literally won't take it.

Also there's the experience of having to use old versions of Adobe Illustrator
because the newest copies just wouldn't work with Windows 7/10\. When
searching the issues at the time it was apparent _everyone_ had to go back a
version if they didn't want it to crash every 20 minutes!

Adobe is an embarrassment of a software company and reading these other horror
stories doesn't surprise me at all. For the time being I'm getting along just
fine with an old copy of the CS5 Master Collection that's 10 years old =)

~~~
olyjohn
I've wasted so many hours on support calls just trying to deal with their
shitty "enterprise" accounts and Adobe ID accounts. Like, you weren't able to
manage your Adobe Licensing console using an enterprise account, it had to be
an Adobe ID. So when we converted our Adobe IDs into Enterprise accounts, we
got locked out of licensing.

The only way to get back in was to create another "Adobe ID" using gmail or
hotmail, etc. Because all of the myschool.edu e-mail addresses were registered
as Enterprise accounts now. Their support is all but useless when it comes to
these kinds of problems, and there's no way to submit feedback to a higher
level about what's going on.

This also broke access for people who had subscriptions and accounts tied to
their school addresses. Total disaster.

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robotstate
Adobe has upped their scumbag strategy recently. I needed to use Acrobat for
one task, so I signed up for a free trial. Of course, I forgot to cancel it
and got charged $15. I then went to go cancel my subscription completely and
found that they wanted to charge me a $30 early termination fee on top of
that!

~~~
laurentdc
Same for Creative Cloud:

> if you have 5 months of your contract left when you cancel and you pay
> $20/month, you have to pay 50% of the $100 remaining balance = $50 early
> termination fee.

I wish they offered the three software people use most to open design files
(Ps, Ai, Id) for like $9.99/mo. I'd totally keep it even if I use the software
like once a month. Instead I have to either pirate it and run it in a VM or
abuse the trial system. There's no way I'm paying $52/mo to export the
occasional logo from .ai to .svg

~~~
beardbound
I’m pretty sure Inkscape supports that, although I’m not sure how good it is
at that function. I used to do my photo editing in Gimp, but it’s a pain. I'm
going to check out affinity though based on the recommendations. I used to
like acrobat too, but it got too bloated. I rarely use PDFs for anything other
than scanning receipts for tax reasons and pretty much every cloud storage app
supports that.

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bitwize
One more reason for me to prefer GIMP over Photoshop.

I still won't convince my friends running old pirated copies, but still...

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sillysaurusx
$35/mo for all adobe products is a pretty good deal. It’s low enough to make
people reconsider whether catching a virus from Piratebay is worth the hassle.

Companies are usually vulnerable to social engineering attacks. It’s arguably
the most successful attack vector. I’m not excusing Adobe’s failure in this
case – they should do better – just saying that it’s reasonably common.

EDIT: I didn’t know they do things like early termination fees. That’s pretty
bad.

~~~
pixelbath
The lowest price on Adobe's page is $52.99 per month for an individual user.
The $33.99/month cost is for a _single_ application under the Teams pricing.
The Teams version of all applications is $79.99 per month.

Only student discounts go below $20, and that's only for the first year
($29.99 thereafter). You have to register with an .edu email address or send
in a copy of your student ID to be eligible for that discount.

