December 7, 2024
by Andrew G. Watters
I'm ditching Adobe Creative Cloud after 10 years with it, and 30+ years with Adobe. I'm so sick of the cancellation process. Had to sit through a
three-hour support chat with three different reps yesterday just to cancel my Creative Cloud seats (I'm retaining Acrobat Pro). All in, I was paying $300/mo. for the software that I barely used because I changed over to Linux in 2023. I've paid thousands of dollars over the last 10 years and thousands more buying physical boxes of software from Adobe since 1991 when I started using Photoshop. It turns out that my experience canceling
is typical.
There are so many great alternative apps on Linux that it's not even funny. Here are the best ones:
- Photoshop -> GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). GIMP has essentially all of the features of Photoshop and is an easy transition.
- InDesign -> Viva Designer. This is an amazing product that reads InDesign files and has the responsiveness of QuarkXPress from the '90s (excellent). Should have done this years ago.
- Illustrator -> InkScape. Vector drawing program.
- Lightroom -> RawTherapee. Processes Canon RAW files wonderfully.
- Premiere -> DaVinci Resolve. Amazing product, with GPU acceleration and delivery encoding that's better than Adobe Media Encoder. Also reads RED cinema footage, which was the key for me.
Those are my main Adobe apps that I use. I use Photoshop and InDesign the most, so it's great having those great alternatives. DaVinci Resolve is unbelievably great and destroys Premiere and Media Encoder with customization and options, though it's harder to get used to than Premiere.
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