I've been eagerly awaiting a new Macbook to completely rid myself of Adobe software.

Over the past decade I've considered installing Adobe software but always held back because of how intrusive and shady the software is (I checked on friends' computers). I've been able to work around having to edit PDFs and used Figma in place of Photoshop for my very basic graphical needs.

Well a few months ago I needed to fill out customs form 5106. This form uses some kind of proprietary Adobe PDF form creation software thing. In order to do anything with it I need Adobe Acrobat. At least that's how far my research took me before I buckled and purchased Adobe Acrobat. I was extremely busy that week and didn't have time to figure out a hacky alternative.

After having installed Creative Cloud all I can say is... it's straight up malware. I doubt I'd be able to get rid of all the junk it installs even if I wanted to. And what's worse is the products are extremely buggy. It's just a mess!

I just checked and Adobe has TWENTY EIGHT processes running in the background. A lot of them are running as root. And of course two of them are NodeJS servers.

These processes are constantly phoning home at such a ridiculous rate that it's impossible to know what to block and what not to. Looking at Little Snitch right now, there are 13 distinct Adobe applications that have been making HTTP requests since I booted my laptop 30 minutes ago. I haven't used a single Adobe product since boot.

I wasn't surprised when, after installing Creative Cloud and restarting my computer, next time I launched Chrome I got a popup telling me that Adobe installed an extension. THANK YOU GOOGLE for taking the time to alert me about this. At no point during the installation process was it clear to me that Adobe would be hijacking my browser too.

I was going to do a fresh wipe to get rid of this junk for good but I wanted to wait until the Macbook was released. Once that laptop arrives I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it.

PSA in case anyone doesn't know this: the built-in Preview app on MacOS can be used to fill in any PDF form. You can type into text boxes on some forms. But even if they're not there, you can add text anywhere on a pdf. You just have to drag your own text boxes to wherever you want to type. It also supports signatures and various shapes.

The options are sort of hidden - View -> "Show Annotation Toolbar" or Tools -> Annotate -> Text.

You shouldn't ever need adobe acrobat.

From the release notes: "Firefox PDF viewer now supports filling more forms (XFA-based forms, used by multiple governments and banks)."

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/view-pdf-files-firefox-...

It’s very frustrating when you send someone (externally) a PDF and it required them to install Acrobat.

Or maybe it’s just Adobe trying to take the P out of PDF…

https://bsaefiling.fincen.treas.gov/NoRegFBARFiler.html

then press the 'prepare' button to trigger the download servelet to get the PDF.

Preview cannot even open the file, let alone allow you to digitally sign it in the manner approved by the Treas Dept.

Also, I can't post a link to the document, since it contains proprietary training materials.

Further, PDF is a monstrous format which includes its own variant of ECMA script built in. I think its pretty unrealistic to expect Apple to cleanroom the whole "standard" so I'm not too upset. They've got probably 90% of the way there, but it's unfortunately not every form.

For Canadians, PPT-054 is a good example [1] - notice $Form$054 and so on in the upper right corner. I can't remember which off hand but either the US I-131 or I-765 has one, too. Unfortunately I-131 isn't even loading in Safari for me at the moment.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ircc/migration/ircc/englis...

I have seen weird pdfs that only display “help” messages when opened in preview… you have to follow a link and then open it in actual acrobat.

If a PDF is meant to be printed, who cares, but if you're sending it to someone, make sure to open it in Acrobat and check if it's formatted correctly; ideally, make it in Acrobat.

The way I got around this problem was to:

1. Download a Windows 10 virtual machine. It's free.

2. Download Acrobat Pro 2020 Trial for Windows. It has a full installation kit.

3. Install the virtual machine. But don't give it an internet connection.

4. Copy the Acrobat kit to the virtual machine and install it.

5. Make a snapshot of the virtual machine. When the trial expires restore the virtual machine.

It will cost you 30GB of space and 1 hour or so, but Adobe will be contained at least.

But yes, Creative Cloud is seriously completely fucking nuts. It's shit I do not and will not ever need or want for any reason and exists just to burn through my electric bill and contribute to climate change. Trying to find ways to disable it gives you cheeky employees who post marketing fluff about how it enables consumer whatever BS, but nobody can explain what those 8 dozen background tasks are doing or why we can't disable it.

I resorted to just deleting parts of the software package one by one. Most background tasks are gone. I made the mistake of updating one (1) time and the number of background tasks doubled. Absolute insanity. Nearly gigabytes of memory swallowed and CPU cycles wasted doing nothing. For all I know, it's nothing but crypto mining processes--and honestly, it probably is since Adobe has shown themselves to be money hungry and absolutely nobody can or will say what those processes are.

I see this "I've tried one solution and I'm all out of ideas" approach a lot. I used Photoshop for many years. Pixelmator is hands down better than Photoshop in every regard and much cheaper.

Not sure where you've seen it, because it sure wasn't in my post.

I've tried the alternatives. I once (regretfully) paid for Pixelmator. I tried Krita. I suffered through GIMP. I've fiddled with Clip Studio Paint.

Photoshop is quite simply better, more full-featured, and stable. Pixelmator would crash fairly often and I'd lose progress. The others just don't have good UI, and in GIMP's case, it's outright user-hostile.

I've managed to switch most of my software to free/cheaper alternatives (Blender has improved a lot lately and I was glad to leave Maya), but when it comes to 2D art on desktops, Photoshop is unfortunately still the best.

As for other alternatives, I've had good experiences with Affinity Design for vector work. Sketch is a favorite with many designers as well (although I personally am not fond of its workflow/concepts but that's just me, clearly it works for most folks). GIMP, while venerable, is aptly named because it's so butt-ugly nobody with any actual artistic talent cares to use it. Seriously, never have I seen anything created with GIMP that looks, aesthetically, competitive with designs created with commercial tools (this isn't the fault of the functionality within GIMP, just an unfortunate side effect of having engineers do art; we suck at that). I've heard good things about Krita but haven't used it seriously because the other tools here do a great job so I've never had to bother.

It's a damn shame Photoshop and other Adobe tools are essntially malware these days. They used to be fantastic back in the day.

I swear I still have left-hand muscle memory for Photoshop editing baked into my hand even now, 20 years since I last used it routinely. ESC, hold space, click + drag, V, hover, click to select layer...

For what it’s worth, a few artist friends of mine are using Krita for drawing, to good effect. (Those not on tablets..)

https://krita.org/en/features/highlights/

There seems to be a recurring praise for ProCreate. At least every time Photoshop comes up ProCreate is mentioned. ( I even have to search they are not coming from the same user )

I guess I will have to add it to list of research topics.

If you are doing basic PS work - the open source alternatives are more than capable. Some non-adobe applications can open PSD files in a reasonably sane fashion.

I’ve been a designer for +20 years and sans-Adobe for five, I absolutely recommend any young designers to avoid the Adobe workflow. You don’t need it.

Photoshop = Pixelmator (Kitura is also very good) Illustrator/Indesign = Affinity Designer

Highly precise vectors I draw in Glyphs/Fontlab.

Gravit Designer is quite good for small vector projects, though it is a subscription.

Adobe Lightroom (the new one) and possibly more can be installed from the App Store without all the Creative Cloud bloat.

It's beautiful to see that inside a decade we've gone from having a monoculture of Illustrator as the sole vector app (post freehand) to having multiple very capable competitors on all platforms.

Because we are on this topic - what is a great alternative to Photoshop that uses mostly similar concepts?

I’ve tried Affinity Photo but simply doing some photo cropping worked completely differently than PS and took me a long time to figure out.

My main use case is having a photo, doing a selection overlay and running „cut via copy“, then deleting the underlying layer, nothing too complicated :)

https://www.photopea.com/

Here is one way to work around it:

- Create a new partition, install macOS and have each bootable partition have its own different FileVault password for encryption. - You can have a Adobe + other nononsencial software partition, and you can bail from typing your real partition encryption key, so your main data is secured from Adobe

I am not a security expert, but I did this for a while and it works well. It is annoying, but I felt my privacy was not at risk while I was booted on the "dirty partition".

Edit: I did it to use Premiere. PDF might be doable without that hassle as others pointed out.

At this point I’m going to recommend a virtual machine.

Eventually I could get it to work but I'm so upset with Adobe that I'm straight up boycotting their software.

I'm ashamed of this but I've fantasized about berating Adobe executives/engineers to their face if I ever met them in real life. Of course I'd never ever do that but even fantasizing about berating someone felt dirty. That's how much time and sense of security this company has sucked from my life.

I still haven't had to go through the process of cancelling my Creative Cloud subscription. I'm sooo hoping they didn't throw in a bunch of dark patterns in there as well but I have feeling they will.

Their gotcha that I know about is that their advertised price per month is actually a year subscription / 12, with the true monthly subscription hidden. When you cancel they’ll try to get you to pay out the remaining months of the year.

I dumped CC two months ago and was bracing for all kinds of shenanigans. But I was really surprised. Not only did it cancel immediately with no dark patterns, but I got a refund for the partially used month.

I was only a month-to-month Photoshop subscriber ($13/month), so maybe it was easy for Adobe to let me go. Perhaps it's harder for higher value hostages... er... customers.

But decision is made, I'm upgrading to a new macbook pro soon and will change my design tools. At least I'll try hard before installing creative cloud.

If the ipad versions of illustrator and photoshop have the features you need that's the only way you can avoid all the nagware. I only need to do the occasional edit to a logo or photo so the ipad pro versions are enough and I prefer the pen to a mouse. I've stopped using them on desktop and use https://smallpdf.com for editing and signing pdfs.

https://pdfexpert.com

I was editing pdf drafts from a publisher and just couldn't stand another minute of dealing with Acrobat. Found this, removed all vestiges of Adobe, and haven't looked back.

I've used Preview a lot, but it just isn't reliable (for me). Apple seems to muck around with the code every couple of versions and break things. Odd.

1) Defaulted to setting PDFExpert as my PDF viewer,

2) followed with a survey I could not close out,

3) required an account to begin.

I'm happy it works for you but I'm tired of the modern software that wants accounts, your data....

Readdle's apps, namely 'Documents', have always been my go-to on iOS for editing PDFs and transferring files[1].

But they went and added a useless VPN to Documents, then released a 're-design' which cuts functionality (and from the reviews is quite buggy). It's sad to see a quality app degrade as the developer adds bloat and new 'features'.

1: For example, Documents (which edits PDFs as well) has a built-in WebDav server that is super useful for getting files between an iPhone and a Linux machine over Wifi.

1. Create snapshot 2. Install obtrusive SW, finish task 3. Restore snapshot.

Any sources for this kinds of workflow?

At least they're not Java Spring servers. That's the software I had to install to fill my tax form in my country.

I suggest you to use virtual machines for those kinds of tasks. That's what I'm doing.

https://mybyways.com/blog/creating-a-macos-sandbox-to-run-ko...

Yes it's been there for a while. But like flatpak and all other attempts to sandbox applications they tend to ask for coarse permissions like Home Directory and once you give that, it can read everything important.

The "sandboxing" model of flatpack and the like is completely backwards. I'd even say it's user-hostile.

The newest ones with M1/M1 Pro are actually pretty beefy, and even the Macbook Air has benchmarks that beat literally everything else in the Apple lineup except the iMac Pros and the new-model Mac Pros.

This doesn't help much with current equipment, but it should make future planning easier.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization

Strict file-level-granularity sandboxing breaks all kinds of multi-file formats [1], because users will want to simply open the respective main file just as usual (especially if launching the file from the desktop or a file explorer window) and then expect that the program of course should be able to access not just that particular file itself, but any associated files, too.

The OS however cannot be expected to know the peculiarities of each and every file format, so how is this supposed to work without either degrading the user experience or else weakening the sandbox up to a point where it is possibly almost pointless?

Plus it also makes editing file paths in programs more annoying, because you can no longer directly edit a path (or paste it in from elsewhere) if it's displayed in a text input and instead always have to spend a few additional clicks because you must go through the OS file picker. (Though admittedly this latter issue might be more of a power user problem)

[1] Multi-part archives, multi-part video files, playlists, videos with separate subtitle files, HTML documents containing links to other local HTML documents or referencing various sub-resources (images/videos/audio/style sheets/scripts/...), Audacity projects, images with metadata in external sidecar files, ditto for georeferenced images, QGIS projects, ...

So, regression to several systems ago? Maybe System 7, or MacOS 8, or 9? If so, we'll need a new thing like Super Boomerang…except with all the modern security, it'd practic'ly have to come from Apple as some kind of option. )*:

OS perms should do the rest. I don't know if OSX has a firejail equivalent but that would be nice too.

I just upgraded to Monterey and OneDrive asked for permissions to a bunch of folders it didn’t need. I denied them. I doubt it’s bad behavior, probably just lazy permissions requests, but I’m glad I had the option.

On Linux you can use flatpak where you can manually limit the permissions on a per application basis.