this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Adobe hasn't lost anything, they have tied up "design" for any business use. Its a total monopoly.
Yeah, this is kinda BS.
Adobe don't care. Nearly every design firm is going to ask you about your Adobe experience, so you can use their Adobe software.
Maybe some of their designers will use GIMP. But that's like saying your office also uses libre office and Linux. Which is extremely rare.
Design lead here. I know photoshop like the back of my hand, but I also know Pixelmator (Mac only), Sketch and Affinity. All are very nice interfaces, one-time, or major version licenses, and smaller, responsive dev teams.
There are compromises in all software, but my team uses Pixelmator and Affinity because we’re a small company and it won’t hurt their design skills to know more tools besides the Adobe suite.
Gimp for a long time had shitty shortcuts and was quite unfriendly to Mac users (the REAL vendor lock-in in the design world btw). Him is just too slow to load, and ugly to look at, similar but less so with Inkscape.
Big firms might be harder to change, but it’s possibly and there are really good alternatives that Adobe probably worries a little about. Unfortunately they aren’t FOSS for the most part.
true that it wasn't good for mac. I gave up apple/mac and their increasingly shitty overpriced products 10 years ago. Since then Linux has come a long way and so has GIMP. Good enough to kill Photoshop? Not any time soon, but good enough for professional use certainly and good enough for new artists to start on. Install G'MIC and it's so much better.
GIMP had some shitty shortcuts, sure. But so did PS.
As an example of better shortcuts - you could get a rectangular selection by pressing "r", which is an example of a very simple and straightforward UI language. You could then adjust that selection with handles without needing any chords or modifiers, zoom in with the number keys or scroll wheel, etc.
You could open a tool, like the colour picker, and switch to a different window without the app going beep and telling you "no", which is what PS traditionally did.
You could open the app and load an image in 1/10th the time it took for PS to start which made it way nicer to use. When I was using PS I generally left it open all the time because of its sluggish start, which meant it was sitting hogging resources all day.
What I'm saying is that your personal workflow and the general UX of whatever software you're used to using is always the thing you're going to use as a point of comparison, and if your expected shortcut is different it doesn't mean it's worse.
Right? I hate the phrasing in this headline. Adobe isn't somehow "owed" those millions so it's totally backwards to call that a loss. Fuck that noise.
They're a business, they should earn their revenue by fostering a healthy competitive environment and then winning through innovation and customer loyalty. Not the monopoly licensing and subscription lock-in BS they've been doing for decades.
My kids keep screwing Nintendo. The other day I saw my kid grab a Lego, he slid it on the table and then made it jump over an orange.
I'm waiting for the letter from their lawyers.
All monopolies (including Adobe) should be seized by the workers, and then split into different companies and collectivized by the workers. Seriously!
In the construction world, Bluebeam is a good contender to Adobe.
Still corporate though
For PDF editing, there's so many good open source products.
Absolutely no reason to be using Adobe just for PDFs. Waste of money.
Which ones do you have in mind, if you don't mind me asking?
I would LOVE to have a FOSS Bluebeam