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Comment by tabs_masterrace | Hacker News Reader

Big reason for this is probably pricing. Adobe's subscription model is hard on startups, small companies & especially individuals, so people naturally look at alternatives. And then they realize that Photoshop isn't quite the monopoly it once was, and apps like Sketch, Affinity & Co. offer similar feature set, while also being more specialized for the job.

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Pricing is a part of it, sure, but the real reason I think is that Sketch was designed from the group up to be a tool for creating digital UI. Without the clutter and legacy of Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop, it was a breath of fresh air. Also, I think it has an important advantage of feeling like a native Mac app. I always feel like I’m firing up a virtual machine when I start Adobe products.

My fairly recent MacBook boots up in less time than Photoshop takes to open.

Photoshop is amazing and I use it daily, but my goodness does it creak.

Photoshop is 'slow to open' because it takes more time than your laptop uses to boot? That's nothing - have you never used GIMP?

On my aging Lynnfield i5 and spinning-rust HDD, GIMP takes 2 seconds to open (I just timed it - from pressing return in a terminal, to all windows appearing on screen). That is faster than most websites load these days. And I should add that I have quite a lot of custom Python plug-ins installed.

There's a lot of valid points that can be criticized about GIMP. Speed is not one of them.

Same here. For small tasks I use GIMP because it’s a lot faster.

Loading my VM is faster than loading any Adobe products.

I actually use an old version of Photoshop in a Windows VM because it's faster than a native modern version. As a perk, I don't worry that it's going to break if I upgrade OSX.

It really is ridiculous. I spent a significant chunk of of my teenage years in Photoshop 6, 7, and CS1 doing all sorts of things and whenever I open it today I find myself shocked at how sluggish and weighed down it’s become. It’s still a powerful tool, but if I had the choice I would absolutely pay full price for a version of 7 or CS1 tweaked to run on modern OSes over the current subscription that feeds an infinite bloat cycle.

I guess it's time for modern alternatives.

Adobe is getting dragged down by its own legacy code which would be a dead end like Windows or IE.

I had an individual Photoshop subscription that kept climbing in cost due to unfavorable dollar exchange rates. One day I audited my account and realized I was paying nearly INR 10k/year (>$120/year) for a tool I barely used, but stuck around with because I was just too comfortable with the UI.

Ditched my subscription and started using PhotoPea.com. Same UI, no costs. For my lightweight use, it's perfect.

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