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I try to avoid Adobe like the plague these days. It's not always easy, but thankfully it's getting easier.

As nobody has mentioned them yet, I would highly recommend Affinity products as alternatives to Adobe software. Coupled with Sketch, I've been able to avoid Adobe products for 2+ years now.

Affinity have replacements for Photoshop (Photo), InDesign (Publisher) and Illustrator (Designer), currently on sale for not too far off the cost of a single month of Adobe CC. They might not have 100% feature parity, but they're really very good.

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I've switched to Affinity from Adobe and what I most like about their products is that they make me actually enjoy using them. And this something that is pretty hard to get right.

When using Adobe software, there were so many moment such as "Why doesn't this work?", "How do I use this tool?", "How do I do x?", "Where is x?" and I had to search for solution. With Affinity however, everything works just as I expect them to and it is very rare for me to actively search for solutions.

Emphatic second for the Affinity recommendation. The three products are extremely easy to use and have a consistent look and feel. I bought the books for Photo and Designer and never used them because 99% of the features are intuitive and every time I got stuck someone on the very active user forum set me straight. Also, the tutorials and how-to videos are excellent. You can buy a Windows laptop and all three Affinity products for less than one year’s subscription to Adobe.

To add to the Adobe alternatives recommendations - DaVinci Resolve is a much better video editor than Premiere, and it's free for personal use. I still pay for my creative cloud subscription, but prefer to use Resolve for its ease of use.

As someone who is very used to Premiere but hasn't used it in 2 years, is Resolve really "that good" yet? I'm also scared of having to learn a new UI. :P

It’s great and not hard to learn. I find most NLEs fairly similar for the meat and potatoes of editing. And as the parent said, it’s got a free version. And it isn’t a gimped free version either. I’ve used it on production projects.

It also comes with Fusion built in which is a great effects app. Using nodes has been a fun new approach to effects that I’ve really enjoyed.

And the paid Studio version is a once-off purchase. No subscriptions and free updates. A breath of fresh air.

Currently getting into it, I'm a long time Premiere editor. It's that good. In many ways it feels more polished than Premiere and the grading tools are definitely way beyond what Premiere offers.

Been eyeing up Resolve, mostly because After Effects has gotten so rusty and janky over the past 10 years of neglect, used to be god-tier software but just doesn't run as nice as it used to or use anywhere near your full machine power.

You had much experience with those parts of Resolve? How does it stack up? Thanks!

On that note, beyond Sketch I've been over the moon about Figma and can't recommend it enough. Not sure how long Adobe CC is going to fare at this rate.

Basically every single slice of the Adobe suite is up for grabs for a company to disrupt by following Figma's innovations.

Honestly they're all so outdated and haven't followed technology, I have an extremely powerful workstation for 3D software and watching Photoshop show an hourglass cursor as I drag a brush stroke is absurd and sloppy.

Do they support Linux?

No, no plans to support and broken in Wine.

Nope, and the wine support is rated as "garbage".

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

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