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At this point I consider the Adobe suite to be basically the same as malware. Their apps seem to want to take over your system, install all kinds of "helpers" t
by katabasis 6y ago
At this point I consider the Adobe suite to be basically the same as malware. Their apps seem to want to take over your system, install all kinds of "helpers" that run in the background constantly doing god knows what, etc. And their security record is terrible.
It's a shame because as someone who has a lot of interest in design, photography, etc. I acknowledge that they create some very powerful tools. I still miss Lightroom. But I'm just not willing to give them this much control over my computing environment any longer.
- pram 6y agoYes, Creative Cloud also vomits a bunch of random stuff everywhere. Right now I can see 5 launchagent/launchdaemons just from having Photoshop and Illustrator installed, which seems insane lol
- kitotik 6y agoNot sure if they still do it, but they also used to put hidden / protected files on any and all disk volumes as part of their copy protection scheme.
- sudosysgen 6y agoWhich is pointless when you realize that their copy-protection systems are broken in minutes every time. They should honestly give up.
- jpalomaki 6y agoThey can be still efective. Even a simple scheme may prevent a corporate user misusing some 30 day trial over and over and instead go through the trouble of getting proper license.
- sudosysgen 6y agoYes, it's probably worth it to get a simple scheme for corporate users only. But Photoshop's protection isn't simple, but it is so widely cracked that in third world countries with limited internet access there are wandering sellers with DVDs of cracked Photoshop for 2-3$ (!)
- BuildTheRobots 6y agoThe rumour a decade ago was that Adobe was the biggest producer of Adobe cracks. The idea was that it'd get people using it for free so it was the goto tool and then they could slam anyone using it commercially.
- dkdk8283 6y agoI searched for this but couldn’t find any technical articles giving details. Have any links or search bait to share?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kitotik 6y agoI’m not finding much searching around either. I probably have an old spinning rust drive somewhere with the files still on them. This was somewhere around the CS5 or CS6 days, pre-subscription model. From memory, in addition to sticking some pseudo-randomly named files in /System/Library, /Library, and -/Library, it would place a file in the root directory of all hfs+ volumes with xattrs set to hide and write-protect the file. Installers would then look for these files to check licensing status. At the time, this was a fairly common trick with pro/prosumer proprietary software.
- thejsa 6y agoI believe on Windows the FlexNet DRM they use(d?) would overwrite Sector 32 and/or sometimes other nearby ones [0], which broke a fair few people’s GRUB2 bootloader installs as well as TrueCrypt as Flexera apparently didn’t check to see if it was in use for something else first. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher#Issues_with_bootloaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher#Issues_with_...
- duxup 6y agoFunny as on windows whatever creative cloud is supposed to do it just quits randomly....I have to wake it up all the time.
- tziki 6y agoAbsolutely this. I'm a very casual user and this is the main point why I'm thinking of getting rid of photoshop. Great tool for whenever I'm in the mood for some drawing but my god does it make me nervous about my security and privacy.
- jrockway 6y agoI stopped using Lightroom because it seems to want to modify the Windows Explorer to have a Creative Cloud section and their background software constantly pops up to tell you that it still exists. What's nice about their subscription model is that there is no sunk cost when giving up. It's $5/month and you just stop paying it. (I switched to Affinity Photo for editing but never found anything I liked for organization/library management. I just copy files around now. It ends up being OK because about 50% of my photos are from my phone, 25% are from a DSLR, and 25% are from film scans. Lightroom never helped me with phone or scanned photos, really, so I didn't give much up. Would still like some central self-hosted photo collector, though. Maybe Perkeep is what I want.)
- acdha 6y ago> What's nice about their subscription model is that there is no sunk cost when giving up. It's $5/month and you just stop paying it. Don't they try to get you to make a year commitment? I remember spending about 30 minutes with someone at Adobe getting them to cancel it when Lightroom was too slow to use on my Mac at the time (which had been more than fast enough for Aperture). After the second or third time that I told them I wasn't going to buy a new computer just for the privilege of running their software, they agreed not to charge a hefty early termination fee.
- robbintt 6y agoYes, I had to pay a fee equal to 50% of the remaining year contract. I will no longer receive PSDs directly from designers, so the designers must now to export stuff to web spec so I can work with it outside adobe.
- gtkspert 6y agoI marked my card as damaged, and when it was replaced I refused to give them the new details...
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
- birdyrooster 6y agoOn Windows 10 with only Photoshop installed I see: Adobe Update Service, Adobe Notification Client, Adobe IPC Broker, Adobe Installer, Adobe Genuine Software Service, Adobe Genuine Software Integrity Service, Adobe CEF Helper, Adobe CEF Helper, Adobe CEF Helper. That is 9 background processes for an app I haven't used in a week.
- epse 6y agoCount the node.js and postgres instances as well
- ukyrgf 6y agoThis past week mine has started doing something even more fun on Windows 10: creating "WpSystem" folders on the root of all of my secondary hard drives and putting AppData>Local>Packages>Adobe.CC folders inside of them with a bunch of Internet Explorer and other dump files in it.
- Lammy 6y agoStuff like this is why I'm still hanging on to my old Photoshop CS3. Some of the newer features are cool, but my needs are pretty basic and haven't really changed in the time CS3 has existed.
- greggman3 6y agoSadly with OS upgrades that's often not possible. I suspect CS3 runs on Windows but with Apple's aggressive removing support for old features you can no longer run CS6 on MacOS AFAIK.
- thejynxed 6y agoWonder if that is because everything from CS6 and earlier is 32-bit and Apple nuked 32-bit support in MacOS.
- tasty_freeze 6y agoI have CS6 on my windows machine and it is 64b. I would be surprised if CS6 wasn't available as a 64b option on macos.
- pkulak 6y agoThat kinda stuff runs well in a VM. Not too GPU dependent, so you generally get very-near-native performance. The only problem I end up having is constantly blowing away my VMs, racking up too many new installs, and running afoul of key limits.
- fullstop 6y agoHave you seen qubes os? [1] Obviously this would not work on OS X, but the concept is fascinating and definitely a different and unique approach at security and isolation. 1. https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/
- VistaBrokeMyPC 6y agoQubes is great but be careful... I tried giving a specific usb port to a windows vm to play games with a joystick and accidentally gave all of my USB inputs to it, effectively locking myself out of dom0. Oops.
- zouhair 6y agoThat's the UNIX philosophy. Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure. [0]: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1293001 https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1293001
- pkulak 6y agoThat looks really fun, thank you. I'm going to check this out.. maybe in a VM :D. I really like these kinds of projects. NixOS and Fedora Silverblue are a couple others.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoQubes isn't designed to run in a VM, but it can.
- jzer0cool 6y ago
- unicornporn 6y agoI feel exactly the same and I totally depend on Lightroom and Premiere/AE/Audition for making a living. I would _never_ install their suite outside my editing machines.
- aikinai 6y agoIf you haven’t already, try Capture One. It’s so much faster than Lightroom and, at least for my needs, has much better functionality as well.
- katabasis 6y agoI just made the switch for exactly this reason! Still getting the hang of the UI but seems promising so far. I shoot with Fuji cameras which seem well-supported here.
- leeoniya 6y agoa bit off-topic, but would you have any interest in a barely-used FUJIFILM XF 80mm f/2.8 R LM OIS WR Macro. and also a FUJIFILM XF 1.4x TC WR Teleconverter. my Fujifilm XT2 was stolen during a trip to Europe last year and i've switched back to Nikon since the battery life of the mirrorless was disappointing (due to the EVF). now i have some Fujinon macro glass collecting dust as rather expensive paperweights :(
- FireBeyond 6y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/photomarket/ https://www.reddit.com/r/photomarket/
- benbristow 6y agoSerif Affinity alternatives for Photoshop - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/ Illustrator - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/ InDesign - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/ 50% off each product (one-time purchase with updates, no subscription) too during the COVID pandemic. Won't take you long to adjust at all as they're very similar and the apps are more lightweight and faster than Adobe's products have ever been. Also iPad versions if you want to edit on a tablet. Been using Affinity Photo for a while now as an alternative to Photoshop and wouldn't look back.
- oh-4-fucks-sake 6y agoFor just a free, straight-forward, full-featured PDF reader/viewer/text-finder I've been a long time user of Foxit Reader: https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/ https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/ It's a mature product at this point and have had a good experience for years now.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI used to recommend Foxit too, but all major browsers now ship with good PDF support.
- saagarjha 6y agoNot Safari.
- eric_h 6y agoHow so? I have no problem opening PDF links directly in Safari.
- saagarjha 6y agoSafari "supports PDF", but not well. The PDF viewer is run in an extremely janky view that clearly has not been updated in years. It runs out-of-process, but takes little advantage of the many advances in XPC rendering that have come in recent years; as such it cannot handle looking up services correctly, or vibrancy, or even have Retina support for its UI. And those are just visual: the PDF support itself is shoddy; it's unable to do many things that other browsers can do out-of-the-box (forms?), searching for text has been broken for the better part of a year. It's an obvious rough spot in Safari's otherwise polished interface.
- eric_h 6y agoFair criticism. I guess my bar for what I define as "good PDF support" is much lower than yours - I only generally read them or plug in a digital signature when signing my lease.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- toasterlovin 6y agoOn the Mac, by default, Creative Cloud has an option enabled that indicates it will sync your entire home directory to their cloud storage service! I don’t think it actually does that, because I couldn’t see any of my files when I accessed their cloud storage product via their website, but what in the actual fuck.
- jasim 6y agoThe "Folder Location" option determines the parent directory where the "Creative Cloud Files" folder is stored, which is the actual sync folder. You can verify this by creating an empty directory and moving the sync location there. Bad, alarming UI though.
- killerdhmo 6y agoHi, work for Adobe. Where do you see this feature?
- toasterlovin 6y agoOpen Creative Cloud app. Click Preferences, then Syncing. Folder Location = “/Users/toasterlovin”. That, to me, indicates that it will try and sync that folder.
- killerdhmo 6y agoAh, no. I see your point, this is as a fellow poster indicated, the location for your Creative Cloud Files folder. I will check with the team to see if we can make the language clearer.
- hesk 6y agoThanks for being so responsive. This is a truly alarming UI. While you're at it, please ask the user whether he wants to sync at all during installation. By default it should not sync. I only have Creative Cloud installed because I am a Lightroom and Photoshop user. I use the sync feature in Lightroom but do not need another generic file system cloud sync.
- qwerty456127 6y agoA workaround is to use LittleSnitch (or Windows Firewall Control if on Windows) and block everything Adobe except what you actually need. No freaking app should ever be given this much or any control over a user computer. Every app (except system maintenance tools and other apps which genuinely need full access to fulfill their very purpose) should be constrained within a directory meant right for it + the files the user wants them to open.
- passerby1 6y agoCPU usage goes up in case of blocking, be caerful when on battery. I tried to remove adobe background services crap (or disabling it via services.msc) when used adobe apps on windows.
- sneak 6y agoCreative Cloud is also spyware, transmitting and uploading your logs and activity within the apps silently and without your consent. I use Little Snitch and deny them almost all network access after the first ten minutes they are installed/activated. It’s a big patchwork of stuff, much of it running as admin, including node and other stuff. I don’t trust it at all, and would have a dedicated machine or VM for it if it were practical. Hopefully I can move to the KDE video editor for NLE, and Pixelmator is already better than Photoshop IMO. The only other two I need to replace are Lightroom and After Effects. I think the latter will be hard/impossible.
- draugadrotten 6y agoLook into Davinci Resolve to replace After Effects.
- laurentdc 6y agoI only run their software in a Windows VM since it installs background services (AAMUpdater, AdobeGCClient) that don't go away even after uninstalling and using their cleanup tool. Not to mention the terrible cloud integration that hangs Chrome after trying to rebuild the font cache out of nowhere. It's pretty much spyware behavior at this point. Like with certain video games DRM, Adobe software is one of those cases where the pirated version is actually better than the paid one.
- fouc 6y agoIn general I think we should all be running every single app in their own VMs. And in the oldest or most basic OS possible. Something like Windows XP.
- pjmlp 6y agoYeah, something like a sandbox!
- thejynxed 6y agoYou do not want to run such things in an XP VM if you can help it. XP is such a hot mess security wise that flaws in it allowed attackers to break VM sandboxing more than once.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoEh what? Bypassing VM sandboxing demonstrates a vulnerability in the VM host, not the VM guest.
- josteink 6y ago> In general I think we should all be running every single app in their own VMs. Qubes OS says hello. https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/
- Sevaris 6y agoI always really liked the idea of Sandboxie (https://www.sandboxie.com/ https://www.sandboxie.com/) where you can run any and every application in its own sandbox, but I was never convinced that its security was as strong as it promised to be. I wish MS would implement something like this.
- bitexploder 6y agoAmusing to think about how used to terrible Adobe 0day people are. Zoom has some stumbles and the tech giants seize in the opportunity to promote their solutions. Adobe? More 0day? Just another day at the office.
- BolexNOLA 6y agoAs someone who works in film production I am so done with adobe creative cloud. I use FCPX because I can’t stand how inefficient adobe is on a Mac. It grinds your processor for no reason and renders at half the speed it should. After effects is way better than Motion but it’s just not worth it. I spent $300 in 2011 and FCPX has been flawless (well...after they fixed that first year or so of problems haha). With FCPX having a one time payment and davinci resolve being free, I just can’t justify adobe’s relatively expensive monthly payments when it’s so inefficient and insecure. And the updates! Jesus christ.
- interestica 6y agoYears ago (pre cloud - master collection) I was on Windows and made the switch to Mac with a written guarantee that the apps (I used Flash a lot) would have the same functionality. It turns out that the ability to zoom in with the mouse was crippled and they removed .eps output ability. They continuously removed output formats (eg at least FXG allowed some format interchange until it too was taken away). So, workflows had to be abandoned.
- ddrt 6y agoEvery single step connects and calls home. If a SINGLE step doesn’t then it immediately notifies you to log in. It’s pathetic.
- npmn 6y agoAdobe doesn't even respect the windows start removal and starts background tasks even you disable it from startup menu.
- wickerman 6y agoI used Photoshop for digital painting but wilfully ditched it when I got a new laptop and decided to install Mint on it instead of staying with Windows 10. Then I discovered Krita, which is a linux based open source illustration program which works just as well and I don't have to worry about Adobe eating up half my memory on useless background processes I don't need nor want.
- interestica 6y agoThe fact that I've had to use Adobe's own "cleaner" app to fix problems says a lot.
- sitkack 6y agoThis is why you should have completely distinct systems, install the creative software on separate system, with no capabilities.