Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?

Photoimpact was my fave for a long time, now mainly using affinity designer / photo, photopea and for quick fixes there are dozens of online ai-like things to do most of what needs getting done.

recently found a powertoys addon that lets me resize image using windows context menu / right click -> resize pictures.. no program to load / open.

Corel videostudio and davinci resolve, own it - no subscription needed.

I feel that people switching to another proprietary thing will just run into problems again in the future. It makes more sense to come up with a permanent solution.

The poster child for this is easily the layers palette. It looks like a scrolling list widget like you’d find on any major desktop OS released in the past 30 years but doesn’t behave like one, with oddities like inability to multi-select. Instead, the user is expected to learn GIMP-specific behaviors that aren’t useful in any other program. There’s not really a good reason for this, aside for familiarity for existing users and while that’s an important thing to consider I’m not sure it’s worth impeding retention of new users.

Have tried Figma and it’s ok I guess, but leans too far into prototyping and collab for my own personal use, plus I don’t like how they keep your full fidelity original documents locked away in an proprietary document format (Sketch’s file format is open and publicly documented).

I have a Photoshop license but it’s used only for following art instruction videos (drawing, painting, etc) just to reduce friction, since that’s what the bulk of instructors are using and I don’t want to fuss with remapping keys and hunting down equivalent functionality mid-lesson. All “serious” work is done with other software.