Affinity is definitely a step in the right direction. The Photo/Designer/Publisher combo holds its own and the iPad apps are pretty slick. It would be nice if they added something similar to Data Merge in InDesign, but for the most part, you can pretty much accomplish a lot of the same things for a fraction of the cost. And it's really not that big of a switch, considering a good swath of the market had to make the switch from PageMaker/Quark/Freehand/whatever as Adobe gobbled up the desktop market. It's similar to what Adobe did to the workstation suites 30 years ago.

Let's not forget the postgres instances they start. Why my illustration app needs a postgres server? Who knows

Sheesh. Why didn't they use sqlite?

"No competition" -- for some users, for now, maybe. (Speaking as someone doing web-related UI for a living since the late 90's, and using tools for digital art since the 80's.)

QuarXPress thought they owned the market and then they started taking advantage of their users. Same goes for Adobe. The resentment is building up. Once there's a viable alternative people will quickly switch and never look back.

It took many years and millions, being bundled with the rest of the Adobe suite and, perhaps most importantly, the arrival of OS X and Quark’s inability to migrate to it, for InDesign to displace Quark. And let’s not forget that Adobe had years of experience with PageMaker.

Pro software is hard.

Hell, I remember 2003-2005 and being _excited_ to switch to InDesign. I think the issue pro software has is that at some point it's basically "done", with only small updates still required, yet the developers of said pro software need to make their sales numbers.

I'd be fine with cloud subscription software if the TCO ended up being lower than buying a boxed product, but it's seemingly more expensive than it ever was. $10USD/mo doesn't seem bad, but if you're comparing to a two-year, $200 upgrade price, then you're spending $40 more and can't opt to skip the latest menu reshuffle.

I just wish I understood what everyone is doing that needs adobe? Anything.

I don't even want to use it but the client passes me a PSD which I have to open accurately.

Photoshop puts like 5 folders in Utilities folder for no reason in macOS and runs bunch of daemons (which apparently can be a cause of bad vulnerabilities) and is dog slow in performance compared to a modern alternative like Affinity Photo.

Market dominance surely puts customer satisfaction to the end of the line.

Affinity Pro seems to deal w PSD pretty handily; have you tried it?

For Photoshop, a big part of it is inertia. Companies worked with PS for years, and changing costs money. So students are taught what they’ll use (which is PS), and the cycle continues.

Do you print anything? Draw? Layout?

If you assume the answers to these questions are "yes", what is your response to GP?

If you assume the answers to these questions are "no", what is your response to GP?