Comment on Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade
thesmokingman@programming.dev 3 days agoI really hate it when people blame consumers for problems instead of producers. Let’s go ahead and examine your hypothesis.
- someone wants to learn how to be a designer
- they spend time and money being taught Adobe products in a bootcamp or school
- since they aren’t defined by their job, they do literally anything else in their free time rather than bringing school home with them
- occasionally they see other stuff like Affinity or GIMP but the interface is radically different from what they’re learning or an important feature requires more time to figure out than they can budget
- they get a job that requires Adobe
- years later, when they have purchasing authority, they’re told they need to cut costs and decide maybe researching is a good idea
- the first results for Adobe alternatives are just a bunch of Lemmy threads calling them lazy
Can you point out where in this process our hypothetical user should have done something different? And more importantly why it’s this person’s fault they’ve been vendor-locked their whole career? Note that a critical assumption I’m making here is that not everyone is a power user because, unsurprisingly, not everyone is a power user.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
It’s like the saying: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time to plant a tree is right now.
If James Lee’s videos are a barometer on how artists and creators deal with Adobe, I’m convinced that a relationship Adobe is abusive. He went from defending and offering to help Adobe to cutting them out of his life over the course of 5 months. No one deserves an abusive relationship, but leaving or staying in one is totally a choice that has real consequences.
thesmokingman@programming.dev 2 days ago
This doesn’t answer the question at all. Don’t get me wrong; I have zero interest in supporting Adobe and I tell anyone they’re toxic. What I’m frustrated with is blaming users of their software. To use your real world examples, that’s like blaming millennials for the myth of plastic recycling. You can attack them writ large for something they have no control over or you can go for the source.
A very similar argument can be made about cloud software. The cloud engineering pipeline is geared toward forcing you into Azure, GCP, or AWS. Attacking the DevOps engineer just trying to make a living for the AI abuse supported by Azure is the wrong idea.
Your response is a much better way to change the picture. Education and connection, not blame.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I thought my answer would be obvious, but the answer was to not use Adobe from the start and the next best time to stop using Adobe is right now. It doesn’t matter where you are at in your career. The answer isn’t always easy to implement and it isn’t what we want to hear. It’s why many of us are here on Lemmy and not Reddit. We decided that not having the good things at Reddit was better than the shit we had to put up with over there.
As far as the cloud goes, moving things back on prem is the best option to not be in that abusive type relationship. It’s what I’ve been learning in my skillset in IT over the past 2 years in my spare time with some junk parts I had laying around, a few hard drives, and retired PCs I acquired that can’t upgrade to win 11. My skills will be sharp as the momentum builds toward the tipping point of moving off cloud including running AI locally. My favorite thing has been learning pf/opnsense. If you’re old enough to remember the PIX before Cisco it was originally created with off the shelf hardware. pf/opnsense feels like a return to that adapting to a lot of different hardware.
Ultimately I don’t blame someone for staying in an abusive relationship, but I can’t pity them when there are options to get out. I just show them how to get out and the struggles that will come with my choices. Otherwise the next cloud thing will be User Operating Systems as a Service and that’s going to be a whole 'nother shitshow. Imagine $20+/mo just to boot your computer/phone/tablet.
thesmokingman@programming.dev 1 day ago
I’m somewhat flabbergasted. How does someone starting design tomorrow get schooling and career experience (both of which almost universally require Adobe products) without using Adobe products? Where are these programs and jobs accessible to the entire market? Where the easy path that most will take (do you know how many active users Facebook, Reddit, and X the Everything App still have?)?