I'm actually a designer, but I stopped using Adobe a very long time ago for unrelated reasons — when they switched to the subscription model. For that reason I didn't even try to run them.

I do realise that might be an untenable position for someone in Hollywood since FCPX is not a match for Premiere / After Effects at that level, however, there are plenty of other things that do the job of Photoshop and Illustrator, and they are not alternatives, Sketch is genuinely vastly better than Illustrator, and for Photoshop, there have been quite a few alternatives that the whole class of image manipulation apps got commoditised.

I still will use adobe apps and the main reason is my university offer them for free. But I agree adobe’s subscription is an overkill for personal use

That's Adobe's way of getting you hooked. It was the same for me at my college. It took me a long time to port my muscle memory to Sketch.

If I had an advice to give to my college self, I would advise not even starting with Adobe: if you're a designer and use their tools, the tools you need to make money with isn't even available for sale, you can only rent. So you might end up in a place where Adobe jacks up the price of Creative Suite by 10-100x per month after becoming dominant like Oracle, and you would have to pay your dues to their feudal fiefdom just to be able to continue your profession - else you'll starve. Not a great place to be for anyone.

FWIW that’s exactly why Microsoft office and windows is so prolific, it’s what people know from school so it’s not even a conversation on switching.

Even if Microsoft is gauging companies with licenses.

And exactly why Google responded with chromebooks and free gsuite for education.

Unfortunately, there’s no match for Photoshop for serious image editing.

Affinity Photo isn't a match for Photoshop, but it's remarkably close at a fraction of the cost.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

Indeed. I was pretty well versed in Photoshop but switched to Affinity some years ago and I'm genuinely very, very happy with Affinity Photo. I wouldn't switch back even if Photoshop was free.

FWIW, I have found Figma to be better than Sketch.

Same here - jumped the ship a couple of days ago and thoroughly impressed so far. Plugins system is sorrowly missed at some moments, but should be arriving soon from what I understood. Everything else, including performance (I'm amazed by how fast that WebGL through WebASM works) - better.

I used to have an amd hackintosh with an a10, and I used premiere pro and Photoshop all the time with no issues.