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Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
218 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
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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.
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.
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.
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?)?
That's the other half of that saying. Hindsight is 20-20. (I could've sworn the tree planting idiom was more well known, sorry for not completely explaining it) Obviously the best solution is to not get in an abusive relationship . The next best time to not be in an abusive relationship is right now.
Yes I know how many users the major centralized social media platforms have. I've chosen not to be on those platforms and with it the benefits that come with having those amount of users. Like I said though, I don't blame one for staying and I cannot pity those that stay because there are options.
Watching YouTube videos, reading manuals, just using alternatives, and asking questions to other people in places like forums, stack exchange, and the like. The self taught route is a completely valid option when the whole world is-wrapped up in nonsense. My experience post school taught me more in 6 months in the field than schooling and prepping for certification exams ever taught me. If you watched that 2nd James Lee video he goes through what he did to switch to DaVinci.
LMGTFY
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Many of these programs are free and open source and available across all platforms.
as far as jobs go, if it's like mechanics, you bring your own tools and do the job required. Even if Adobe products are provided, use alternatives when and as often as possible. Then when the opportunity presents itself show how you did your work without Adobe to those with purchasing power at the company. Change isn't going to happen overnight.
I never claimed that ditching Adobe would be easy. My opinion is that it is necessary for the health of the industry.
You haven’t linked actual jobs and programs. Your snide Google search was a GitHub repo, not school programs or job postings that show your anecdotal dream is a reality. Your foundational assumption is that everyone wants to grow exactly like you did (ie not the easy path) which is completely wrong.
You do not appear to actually understand the audience you’re holier than. This the same conversation that’s been happening in the Linux world for more than two decades. Good luck changing the world.
I'm not going to do all the work for you. Go into business for yourself or check indeed or some other job site. I honestly thought I was being trolled with how little you tried to understand or put forth some modicum of effort, but now I somehow think it's genuine that you need someone to hold your hand through the entire process. Change is scary and often not easy. I don't know how else to break it to ya.
If you are the audience, then the industry is doomed to be stuck in the Adobe abusive relationship until some self starters take over. All it takes is some effort to break a habit, effect change, or start something new. If you expect to have other people change things for yourself, well good luck with that.