this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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I'm a creative. I've used InDesign since version 1.0. I've built my career with Adobe tools.
Adobe Creative Cloud peaked around ten years ago. Since then, it's totally jumped the shark. I'm not even talking about the company, just the software and its features.
When I open InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator I'm trying to work. It's software I've used for, in some cases, 25 years. My point is, I know it inside and out.
The past few years, every new "feature" gets in the way of my work. Adobe has been changing things that already worked very well, or has added extra steps to do something that used to be easy.
Even worse, Adobe has started to fill its software with notifications that can not be disabled. Invasive blue dots. Invasive blue buttons. Invasive blue overlays that stay visible on the screen even when the software is minimized. Rich tool tips that aren't disabled by the option to disable rich tool tips.
Adobe has lost me as a devotee. It's been taken over by venture capital. The company only cares about adoption of new features.
Now, I use it out habit. Because my workplace provides it. Because it's what folks on my team are used to... but because they've come to the ecosystem so late, they only know a fraction of its capabilities.
If Adobe faces demise, I will mourn what if once was. But not what it has become.
Have you tried Gimp and Inkscape?
Neither was worth the time it took to uninstall them when they proved almost unusably inferior to the industry standards.
These things are the standard for a reason, OSS hobbyists who are not graphic designers or admin workers generally will never be able to make something that is in the same league for the exact same reason that I couldn't build a compiler better than the industry standard one, even if I technically had the coding skills to make it, because I haven't spent decades using one professionally, so I wouldn't know what an industry pro would want from it.
The great thing about open source is that it's generally developed by people who use it. Proprietary software is just developed by people who get paid by someone who's just doing it to make a profit...
Then that's even worse, because the design of the OSS "alternatives" to everything I use daily for work screams "hobbyist who just needed the basic functions of a word processor and spreadsheet editor for school".
Wow, imagine an .ml trying so hard to go to bat for corporations and proprietary software. Hilarious...
I hate that it is the way it is, but OSS "alternatives" are not serious tools for professionals. That said, I'm 100% in favor of nationalizing Adobe and Microsoft, since they've created a world where only their tools are good enough to do the job, but that's not the conversation we're having here.
Here's a simple test: take all formatting out of a copy of Ulysses or some other doorstopper of a classic novel so it's just a giant wall of text. Give two publishing pros each a copy of that wall of text, have one turn it in to a publishable book using the industry standard tools and one do the same task with the OSS "alternatives" and see who's done first, and which version is the better looking final product.
Wanna place any bets?
I think your argument is a little outdated because libre software has come a long way in the past few decades. I couldn't imagine not being able to turn a manuscript into a publishable product with FOSS software in the state they are today.
If your argument is that it would take longer because someone has to relearn the interface, that's just because they're used to one and not the other. If it's because they prefer features that the other doesn't have, that's just preference but easily circumvented.
The only other way I could see there being a difference is because of patented features, but that's a discussion that's already been had in this thread. And it's not about open-source developers being in any way worse than closed-source developers.
I'll confess to not having compared them in the last 10 years or so, and I'd be happily surprised to be wrong, but I'm betting that "long way" is mostly in terms of features used by casual/home users, not power users who use the software on a professional basis to do professional work. .