Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenspot | Hacker News Reader

It gets even worse if you need to do subscriptions for your team. The management console is an utter joke. Adobe owns some of the killer apps of the creative industry but there are alternatives:

Photo editing (Photoshop):

- Windows: Gimp, Xara Photo, Affinity Photo, Corel Photo. Paint.net

- macOS: Pixelmator, Affinity Photo, Gimp

Vector editing for digital (Adobe had Fireworks but abandoned it, Illustrator is rather print and clumsy):

- Windows: Affinity Designer, Inkscape

- macOS: Sketch, Inskape, Affinity Designer

Vector editing for print (Adobe Illustrator):

- Windows: Inkscape

- macOS: Inkscape

Desktop Publishing (Adobe InDesign):

- Windows/macOS: QuarkXPress which is even more expensive

View on HN

Indeed. Quit Adobe like a drug and never looked back. I am fortunate enough to have a personal license of CS6 Master Collection but rarely use it. The people that are really stuck are graphic (non app/web) designers because InDesign is the standard and there are no viable replacement...yet. Adobe and Autodesk are both examples of "too big to fail" and it is only a matter of time before some company(ies) come along and take their market for good.

>only a matter of time before some company(ies) come along and take their market for good.

But folks have been saying that for years and also pointing to the open-source alternatives as done here and it has just gotten worse with CC.

For individual people, that have to retrain and use things as they wish, open source stuff works. If I proposed that sort of move at my company, I would get laughed out of the room. It's too entrenched as an "industry standard", even though every user I comes across curses various products at least a few times a day. As a desktop/application support person, I have to spend an inordinate amount of time daily helping figure people (on $3-5k workstations that can handle advanced 3D modeling) what new thing f'd up. CC being installed alongside our previous CS6 license has made this worse.

I don't think any investor would risk the money it would take to take on Photoshop/Illustrator replacements and whatever would be created would not only need to allow users to work flawlessly with those file formats but meet the baseline of tools, UI, and stability (though the latter might not be as hard). I'm not well-versed in all the possibilities out there but, like Autodesk, I think this is an extremely difficult monopoly to break.

This is a good list. The alternatives have seriously improved in the last few years (Seemingly after Creative Cloud became a thing.) I've been using Pixelmator over photoshop and Sketch over illustrator for the past few months and it has been great for the most part. I'm not a pro user of either (I'm more on the dev side) but they have served my uses well.

Desktop Publishing: Scribus (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, ...)

What can Scribus or any DTP system can do that LaTeX/TeX can't?

I haven't heard of DTP, QuarkXPress in 20 years. I'm surprised they're still relevant today.

Good enough results for graphic heavy layouts without high labor costs.

I'm a typographer and sometime book designer (as well as a programmer). I've also used InDesign since 1.0, so I'm very familiar with what it does. Having said that, I'd love to find an alternative -- InDesign has gotten bloated and awful over the years, not to mention the dreadful subscription policy. (It's one of the few CC apps for which I cannot buy a standalone/perpetual license.)

However, Scribus comes nowhere close to InDesign. Here are several basic things I require from a page-layout application if it's going to be any kind of competitor to InDesign:

1. Work in picas and ems, not inches. (Inches are fine for specifying page sizes, but beyond that, picas are the standard in typography.)

2. Be able to zoom arbitrarily. Scribus doesn't seem to support zoom levels more than 400%, so I can't work with even medium-sized text at all accurately.

3. Be able to easily set kerning and tracking on arbitrary text. The Scribus manual caims this is possible, but mucking around with the latest dev version (1.5.3), I couldn't figure out how to do it. (I did really well at totally fucking up my layout just by scrolling, through. Scribus is a bit too response in some ways.)

4. Be able to use OpenType features. Apparently Scribus 1.5.4 will include some of that. But to a typographer in this century, OpenType is essential, not optional.

Apologies to the Scribus developers, but being told that it's a capable publishing app is a bit like a C programmer being told that BASIC should be just fine for them -- hey, they're both programming languages, right?

And yes, I've attempted to use TeX (and LaTeX, and ConTeXT, and XeLaTeX, and...) to do high-quality typographical work. It's possible, but the amount of effort to undo Knuth's poor aesthetic choices (not to mention interface with archaic architecture) is significant, and frankly, not worth my time.

Grumpy typographer is grumpy.

I find the same types of gaps across the OSS photo/graphics/layout stack. For my avocational use, OSS is great (and money efficient). If I had to make a living, I'd buy Adobe CS, because I would a) need transferrable skills for in-house employment, and b) need the refined GUIs and workflows to compete with everyone else using Adobe CS.

Affinity is excellent! Thanks... I use Photoshop once every few months and have been wanting to lose the recurring cost for a while.

Photo RAW/workflow management:

- Lightroom

- Aperture (now discontinued)

- Darktable (open source, does RAW conversion but not great on library management)

- CaptureOne

- ???

Linux gets no love?

Because Adobe CC products don't run on Linux? Think before commenting!

You don't need Adobe Cc on Linux if you're going with one of the alternatives. And both Gimp and Inkscape are Linux applications, GIMP is even part of the GNU suite!

> You don't need Adobe Cc on Linux

What? Even if you wanted to, you can't use Adobe CC on Linux. Doesn't run. So these aren't alternatives, they are your only options. It's not that "Linux gets no love", it's that Linux simply doesn't apply in this case, because nobody who's currently using Adobe CC is on Linux.

I happen to use Linux as my only boot OS and I actually own a copy of Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat that I use semi-regularly. Everytime I want to use either, I have to spin up a Virtualbox Windows VM just to edit a few pictures. The alternative is to run it on WINE, which technically even qualifies as "runs on Linux" but isn't perfect.

So I would actually love to replace the Adobe products wih native Linux alternatives, because then I can get rid of the Windows VM or the WINE trouble.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com