Comment by noirscape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noirscape | Hacker News Reader

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Administrative work needs 2 killer suites to work: Microsoft Office and the Adobe design suite.

Any replacement for these will basically have to be a bug for bug clone if you want them to work. LibreOffice is 80% of the way there, but it still mucks up too often to be reliable. PDF viewers are plenty, but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].

Third party vendors you have to work with for other things (ie. Printing folders) require stuff to be in the formats made by these two software suites and their response to "your printing press isn't following the PDF spec" isn't gonna be "oh sorry, we'll migrate our hardware", it's gonna be "the printer says no and my other customers don't complain so just send me the files correctly."

Since Adobe and Microsoft are the default, this is something third party vendors can say and get away with. The shoe is on your foot, not on theirs.

[0]: GIMP doesn't even come close to being a Photoshop replacement, they do very different things. Photoshop is a photo editor + drawing program, while GIMP is aimed at image manipulation. The difference comes into play with how the interface is designed and the complexity of certain actions in each program. GIMP is designed to let you do specific individual things to an image, while Photoshop is more aimed at giving the user entire workflows.

I'm not sure I agree with Adobe design suite being needed. I am a close to someone who's been through multiple different public sector institutions in my country and the only true constants is the cord Microsoft Office suite (Word+Excel+PowerPoint), Outlook and more recently Adobe Acrobat (mostly because of digital signing) and Microsoft Teams.

The core office suite is very good and people are very used to it. It also seems to be the hardest to truly replace, in my opinion.

LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are a good step forward but they're not replacements yet, for a lot of people, due to a simple fact (already mentioned somewhere here): people have been using this software for decades and are very used to the way they work, and replicating that, especially nicher things, is not trivial and takes a lot of work. Still, I'm hopeful.

Outlook, Acrobat and Teams may be easier to switch, particularly the last two. Outlook (and Exchange) has some extra nicities compared to plain standard email (from the top of my head, I recall read receipts and automatic responses for when you're away being important ones), but there are some nice projects tackling both the client and server side parts of those features. Acrobat could maybe be replaced by a reader like Okular, given a bit more polish, and Teams is so bad and often used in such basic ways that it could trivially be replaced by something like Mattermost (though I personally much prefer Zulip's model).

Again, all this is based on my experience and certainly won't apply everywhere.

People complained about the ribbon and how hard it was to learn/use when it first came out, now 18 years latter (some people reading this were not even born when it was introduced!) it is the default and nobody talks about those issues anymore. They will learn LibreOffice if they are told they must - they will complain but people always complain about change.

There are actually quite some projects named in the article that are moving in on Adobe turf:

- Typst (a new typesetting tool, previously covered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941) - PagedJS, a browser polyfill for CSS paged media - and something called "Pushing forward for CSS Print" which is also about creating professional print media with HTML + CSS

And to top it off, there is a project for digital signatures (Signature PDF) to compete with Adobe Sign...

So I would say the score isn't too bad on that dimension.

The vast majority of users do not use Adobe at all. The vast majority of users don't need anything complex out of their office suite. LibreOffice is enough for the vast majority of users.

If you are a large organization you tell the printing press manufacture to fix their bugs or you will find a different vendor. You can even do this if the bug is proved to be in your software not the press. You and I do not have this power, but governments are that big (your company also might be).

The issue with the Adobe suites is that their alternatives need to be workflow-identical, it's not just how good or bug compatible the competitor needs to be.

The Affinity suite is excellent, but a heavy Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign user isn't going to want to move to Affinity due to workflow changes, and possibly plugin ecosystem gaps.

They do not have to be workflow identical. They just need to be equivalent. I can teach someone a different workflow and they will catch on with time. However if the new workflow is worse (slower, worse results, or other such negatives) that will be found out.

Now it will take power users several years to learn all the tricks of the new workflow and that is productivity lost in the short term. This alone may not be worth the cost. If the new workflow is better though it will be worth it.

> I can teach someone a different workflow and they will catch on with time.

And this is why a Photoshop user won't move to a new suite of tools.

> but there's no effective replacement for Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop[0].

Ah photoshop. Every municipality employee uses photoshop at least 5h a day!

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