I worked there. It was a greasy and miserable place run by people who should have retired long ago. Everything was waterfall development, and there was a yearly slave-rush to their miserable convention show, where only half the stuff really worked. No one really knew what they were doing. It was like a time machine back to 20 years ago. So glad I left.

Thank you for confirming the things I have suspected for a long time.

Maybe it's the path I took in the industry but I had the displeasure of having to automate the installation of Adobe security updates to tens of thousands of Windows boxes a decade ago right through having to (briefly) write software targeting a customer's Adobe Experience Manager product in the last couple of years. There's a long rant bubbling up about AEM, but I'll resist the temptation and just say a suitable 4-letter word, instead.

Their products cost a fortune and for the privilege of forking over your hard-earned money, the company does things like this. I still own a license for one of the older versions of Photoshop post-Activation. I corrected it in a manner that would probably qualify as "cracking it" before ever activating after having run into grief with the product at my day job (at the time). Anymore, if there's a reasonable alternative, that's the kind of stupid I won't spend my money on.

As a long time user of one of their tools (Illustrator, which I have a strong suspicion is not a prestigious team to work on) I have always suspected something like this. Sigh.

I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change. And for video, DaVinci Resolve. There might be cases were you’re tied to CS, but the bulk of the work can be done in these apps.

I've also switched to Affinity back in March, because of the fact that Creative Cloud was becoming too expensive for me and my crappy 3rd world income.

That’s the big plus, it’s affordable and you own it, no more monthly pay outs.

What about a replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro on (Windows)?

That is the one app that keeps me having a Creative Cloud subscription. In a business setting I find it essential.

I've been using pdfstudio from Qoppa[1] for a while. It's been a good replacement for AcrobatPro for me.

1. https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/

have you looked at foxitPDF ? this is a comparison table from Foxit's site against Acrobat Pro: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-editor/adobe-acrobat-alter...

(not associated with Foxit in any way shape or form nor a user)

Be careful with Foxit software, though. They have a history of doing some very unsavoury things. Their Wikipedia page has some details for those interested.

Do you have a specific link? Their Wikipedia page is pretty short and I don't see anything notable in there.

Ah, my bad. I was reading the page for the company not the product.

I recently switched from Foxit to PDF-XChange and I'm enjoying it so far https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor

Thanks, first time I'd heard of it. Looks a good match.

another one to look at is Nitro as well (just looked for an alternative based on Silhouette's comment below). here's a link to G2 for comparisons: https://www.g2.com/products/foxit-phantompdf/competitors/alt...

Based on your feature request list, all but the form creation (iirc) is handled well by PDF-XChange by Tracker Software. It's a one time purchase + optional maintenance upgrade model.

The OCR is what keeps me in Acrobat camp, too. And very sadly since this company is outright customer-hostile and the software is absurdly expensive.

I've been trying tesseract but find it lacking -- need a better shape/text/picture region recognition (people are working on it these days), and something which puts it back in tagged PDF form. I also want to try whatever Nuance/OmniSoft is selling these days since I used to be a OmniPage customer before.

I'm in the same boat. I keep a virtual machine with an up-to-date Acrobat Pro license just for the OCR. It's not that the OCR is state-of-the-art any more. It's not as accurate as ABBYY in my experience. But it still generates the most predictable, consistent bounding boxes for text selection out of the alternatives that I've tried.

Not sure how ABBYY FineReader is priced these days, but it was always giving me excellent results.

That, and Adobe Lightroom. I tried to switch and had a mixture of Darktable, RawTherapee, RapidPhotoDownloader and digiKam running. It was unpleasant and years behind Lightroom, unfortunately. Even more unfortunate is that I have a stand-alone license for Lightroom 5, but my camera is too new for it (no support for its RAWs).

Darktable has had a major upgrade recently , and at least on Windows, it’s pretty much on par and its GUI has had a major boost in responsiveness.

Thanks for the feedback, I hadn't thought about replacing Lightroom yet.

I do like Lightroom, but the catalogue speed with 100k+ photos is glacial on my PC. I tried importing 30 years of photos rather than having multiple catalogues, as tagging consistently across all would be useful ("Hey auntie Sally, look at the photos of you aging!").

I use Capture One in Lightroom's place and it really is an excellent tool, its raw processing capabilities are fantastic and the features mean I barely (if ever) have to reach for a more-powerful editor like Affinity.

I'm not sure whether it meets your needs, but in architecture and MEP engineering we use Bluebeam Revu almost exclusively. Personally I find its UI very frustrating, though.

What are your must-have features?

Great question :)

1. Impeccable Word to PDF conversion 2. Combining, rearranging pages and documents 3. Editing: add/edit/delete text, images from PDFs 4. Form creation (not something we use now, but plan to) 5. Protect PDFs (as much as you can)

That is the majority of what I can remember using in the last 12 months. I have occasionally used:

6. Compare files 7. Redact - though usually I edit the PDF and delete the text directly 8. OCR 9. Comment. But I HATE the PDF commenting experience, as does everyone in the team when we try and pass comments around.

Another very happy user of Affinity products here!

There is nothing standing in their way to do the same with their software in a couple of years.

Don’t think they will, Serif has always worked this way, at least not unless they seriously start to threaten Adobe with a bigger market share.

Also I got 8 free updates that other companies would have asked money for. At least 2 big performance updates.

Yeah, but you won't have lost near as much money if they do.

I have officially given up on Adobe after 28 years, too. Even with the new features in Potatochop/Lightroom on image protection. I can't run my old software, or I can't obtain my old software, and CC is just a shitshow of processes permanently running and sucking up battery power.

DaVinci Resolve is amazing. I'm becoming better and better with GIMP. CaptureOne is crappier to use but has much better output. Lightroom iOS works fine for freebie Instagram pics.

> CC is just a shitshow of processes permanently running

I HATE this so much that I have an AutoHotkey shortcut that I run after I'm done using any of the CC programs. It kills everything Adobe. I also have a Windows scheduled task that runs every 15 minutes that deletes any autoruns from Adobe in the registry, deletes any Adobe services, etc., because I found that they obnoxiously fully re-added things whenever I would open CC.

Google Chrome is giving up on Adobe Flash. Says it will be unsupported after Dec 2020.

Even Adobe's own Flash updater is begging you to uninstall it now days.

I see people running OSX Lion to run newer CS versions than CS3 because they can’t be installed on operating systems that have gotten security updates in the last five years.

=\

What version of OSX was Lion? Snow Leopard 10.6 was the last one for the original cheese graters, and I know plenty of people running those and Final Cut 7 systems. It ain't broke, so they ain't fixin'. It's older SD tape based work flows that just ingest content from tape all day long, and then places it on the SAN for others workflows.

Lion is 10.7, one after Snow Leopard.

I’m not sure why you’d run 10.7 instead of either 10.6 or 10.8 (or 10.9) btw. Lion is buggier than the adjacent releases (which are really solid).

Lion was the last version of OSX that I ran. After having my hard drive corrupted twice by it I gave up and put Debian on my macbook.

Lion is the Catalina of its era, right down to all the broken legacy apps (because no Rosetta). Catalina is much worse, mind you.

Mac Pro 1,1 was officially supported to Lion, it can run up to and including El Capitan if you use a patched installer .

The last cheese grater perfectly supports Big Sur, short of wireless drivers.

Just use a pirated copy of the software you own. There are plenty of versions out there that don't require any activation, and for the most part, just work. As long as you own a legal copy, I can't see owning a cracked one as being illegal. Definitely not unethical.

Attorney here! (Not legal advice.)

You are wrong. Software is generally licensed, not sold. The only person who "owns" Photoshop etc. is Adobe. The rest of us get mere licenses that we are subject to the terms of. Violate the terms, and you're subject to civil and potentially criminal penalties.

It would actually be interesting to have this tried in court.

In Sweden it's totally OK to fix a program you own so you can use it, no matter what the license says. This includes disassemly if necessary.