Hacker News Reader

Comment by omnimus | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.

Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed.

The reason why everyone hates them is that last non subscription version Adobe CS6 from more than 10 years ago is pretty much the same thing what you get now even though users have been screaming for features and bugfixes. Adobe can have their cake and eat it too.

View on HN

> The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.

I disagree with all your points.

I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so.

Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than Affinity.

I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe and I have experienced crashes with Affinity quite recently.

Adobe has complete integration between programs. Eg: You can use AE timelines into Premiere, import Photoshop files into AE, edit vector objects from Photoshop in Illustrator, etc.

Affinity innovation pace is just glacial. V2 introduced some new features but it Serif what... like 10 years? And personally I didn't see any value in the new features. Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.

> I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe

Haha wow. I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon). You ought to play the Lotto.

> Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.

"A lot" is drastically overstating the case. And in many ways Designer is leagues better.

But it's all kinda moot - fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly.

I was a photographer until late last year and there were many weeks I spent 40 hours+ in Photoshop and I don’t remember a single crash.

I’m on Windows, for what it’s worth.

Perhaps Adobe only crashes when it can smell fear... Like printers.

Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.

Somewhat off topic, but your comment made me literally laugh out loud in real life. I am working on a receipt printer right now, and it can absolutely smell fear. Its favorite thing to do right now is to use its incredible power of speed to print half my roll of receipt tape with random gibberish in the several seconds it takes me to pull the power cable. I haven't yet let it run to completion to see if it will eat the entire roll of tape, but I suspect it would.

> * I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon).*

Believe what you will.

Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard.

It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me.

> And in many ways Designer is leagues better.

In what ways?

Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphics software since Corel Draw 4 and Illustrator still seems the gold standard. Figma is great for UI design but it's useless for anything else.

I do think Photo is a lot more usable than Designer and I could see myself using that instead of Photoshop.

> fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly

Trust me, I too wish there was a good alternative to Adobe. I hope with Canva's money they will be able to improve Affinity's products.

I suspect you are very experienced Illustrator and used to its ways and not that experienced Photoshop user. Because Photoshop people around in coments say that Photo is trash but Designer is good.

I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.

I've used both Illustrator and Photoshop for over 20 years.

Before that I was on the Corel suite using Draw and PhotoPaint since the mid 90s.

> In what ways?

Off the top of my head...

Look and feel is a big one. It feels more responsive, and far less bloated.

The Export Persona smokes Illustrator's slices or whatever.

It handles symbols far more smoothly, and I like the way masks work better.

It's better integrated into Publisher, compared to Illustrator/InDesign. Publisher is awesome, and basically has Designer built in.

Working with non-square grids is sooooo much easier.

There's no Creative Cloud malware fouling up my computer, soaking up CPU and memory and storage and spitting pop-ups in my face for no damn reason.

... There are things I miss - vector brushes, and the Transformation tools. But they can usually be worked around. The feeling of being respected by the company more than makes up for those deficits though.

...Which is probably about to change :(

On Indesign side - regular almost daily crashes.

Integration in Affinity Publisher is called studiolink you can use all Photo, Designer tools directly inside it by fliping a switch. Google studiolink you will see Adobe never had anything close to this. When you create a book you can actualy edit placed photo inside the layout seeing all changes directly in context. All Adobe cooperation is linking files that you then have to manualy refresh. You cant even easily copy paste vectors into indesign so they are editable.

I get that Adobe works and has some features Affinity does. But Affinity has some killer fundamentaly better features.

> Have you tried Affinity

Yes. I owned CS6, then switched to Affinity essentially right when it was released. Been using it ever since. Great software. But very much lacking compared to Adobe.

Affinity (Photo) still doesn't support tablets properly. You can play around with parameters affected by pressure and tilt, but here Adobe (and Krita) are ahead.

The only reason I don't use CS6 is because it doesn't work properly with hidpi displays. It doesn't scale well above 100%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com