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An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

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Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#121

Post by brycewray »

squidbeak wrote: post #114
ksec wrote: post #108

>I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one..... >It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, I am reading this and I am thinking god I am old. I thought the Creative Cloud was a fairly recent thing. May be 2018?…

>> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, > I am reading this and I am thinking god I am old. Don't worry, while 13 years seems long enough to make you feel old, you're not old. You'll know you're old when 13 years ago seems recent.

> You'll know you're old when 13 years ago seems recent.

Arggh...

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#122

Post by robocat »

pier25 wrote: post #51

I've been using Photoshop since CS1 (was a Corel user before that). Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013. Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better no…

> Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model

The main benefit of SaaS to a customer is that theoretically the company should care enough to keep their customers therefore the company should want to keep the product evergreen (functional and features and support).

Churn is such a measurable figure.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#123

Post by GavinAnderegg »

stronglikedan wrote: post #68
3form wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what's worse: that they did that, or that the operating system allowed them to do that. On both macOS and Windows according to my understanding that should require admin rights, normally, not to mention the degree to which Apple made macOS immutable (I'm not familiar with the details, to be honest).

It does require admin rights on Win and will pop up the little admin confirmation message on each edit. I'm dubious of the claim that it was written to unnoticed. I use PS daily and I know it hasn't modified my hosts file, because I have, often, and would have noticed (that, and the obvious admin confirmation dialog).

Author here. My hosts file was written to without notice. The Adobe Creative Cloud app runs as admin, and does automated updates (when it's working as intended) without further requiring a password. Most of the things that I listed as deleting in my post required me to enter an admin password to delete. However, the Adobe updater happily updated them without requiring a password. One of them was a background helper in `/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools`, which is granted root access on installation. It runs as root on boot, and can do basically whatever it wants. I don't know how this works on Windows, but I assume it's something similar.

The only reason I knew that it was happening was because of a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664205). I linked to the same OSNews article linked to in the HN post in my piece. It seems like Adobe has reverted this change since then because of the pushback (and insanity) of this sort of change. But there's nothing surprising about the mechanism here. The only unbelievable bit is that they'd choose to do this.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#124

Post by rurp »

robocat wrote: post #122
pier25 wrote: post #51

I've been using Photoshop since CS1 (was a Corel user before that). Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013. Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better no…

> Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model The main benefit of SaaS to a customer is that theoretically the company should care enough to keep their customers therefore the company should want to keep the product evergreen (functional and features and support). Churn is such a measurable figure.

That's the public sales pitch, sure. In practice it's a way for the company to charge more for the same product and quality usually declines faster than non-SaaS software.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#125

Post by robocat »

rurp wrote: post #124
robocat wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model The main benefit of SaaS to a customer is that theoretically the company should care enough to keep their customers therefore the company should want to keep the product evergreen (functional and features and support). Churn is such a measurable figure.

That's the public sales pitch, sure. In practice it's a way for the company to charge more for the same product and quality usually declines faster than non-SaaS software.

I am part owner of a plain SaaS company, and our financial motivation is very very strongly to keep our business customers happy. Churn is highly expensive for us.

Churn is even more expensive for growth SaaS companies, due to equity multipliers.

I remember working for old-school software companies and the incentives were drastically misaligned in the past before SaaS. Existing customers were treated awfully - new customers or updates were where the money was.

Your opinion is a tad too cynical. Although perhaps warrented for twilight products like Evernote getting sold to Bending Spoons. Or the VMware/Broadcom debacle.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#126

Post by hilbert42 »

tokai wrote: post #88
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative. Constant claims of "good enough", 20+ years to implement adjustment layers after dismissing their value for many years a team that doesn't really care at all about it. If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem wou…

GIMP haters needs to be studied. The amount of extreme petty vitriol that project gets is completely out of proportions.

There's good reason why people are annoyed with GIMP/GIMP developers.

For example, I used to use GIMP and became quite expert at it and would often swap between it and Photoshop. That changed when GIMP's developers removed the Fade feature (similar functionality as in Photoshop). The result is that they turned a perfectly functional program into a clunky mess that was ergonomically horrible to use. Using it was now like going from a modern auto gearbox back to a clunky manual.

Their rationale was that fading was better done by layers and such. Technically that's likely so (depending on what one's doing) but for the rest of us who were happy with the Photoshop-like Fade GIMP suddenly became useless.

GIMP's developers are more interested in some strange notion of technical purity than providing good ergonomic software that ordinary users can use. In short, GIMP's just a play toy for them, benefitting the opensource world isn't on their horizon.

Sure, as GIMP's developers they have the right to fuck up their software, what they don't have the right to do is fuck up bona fide users who've spent a large investment in learning the product by essentially making the product unusable.

Keep away from GIMP, as others have said there are much better alternatives now available.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#127

Post by hilbert42 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #36
harvie wrote: post #11

GIMP. How do you feel about it? i know people were sometimes quite critical, it has different workflow than PS, but it seems it gets the job done.

GIMP is very good if you never touch photoshop. It seems using photoshop for any significant amount of time ties you to that software, much like how using emacs for any amount of time ties you to emacs

Unfortunately, Photoshop is easier to use than GIMP, it's ergonomically more functional. This is lost on GIMP's developers (see my other post).

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#128

Post by kazinator »

I've been using Gimp since the mid-late 1990's. The first time I used it, I got it running was on a Sun SPARCStation 20 --- which was running Red Hat 2.0 Linux!

I still reach for that on the rare occasion I have to do some image editing. There are some alternatives in the FOSS image editing landscape now worth checking out.

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#129

Post by [deleted] »

hilbert42 wrote: post #127
mghackerlady wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GIMP is very good if you never touch photoshop. It seems using photoshop for any significant amount of time ties you to that software, much like how using emacs for any amount of time ties you to emacs

Unfortunately, Photoshop is easier to use than GIMP, it's ergonomically more functional. This is lost on GIMP's developers (see my other post).

[deleted]

Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

#130

Post by fragmede »

yardie wrote: post #47

> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature o…

Yeah that's the part that doesn't make sense. Like, Adobe, if you want to be a cloud SaaS company, you need to sell SaaS services. It's like Google spelling off their domain services to square space. Makes no sense, but what do I know.
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