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I need this so badly. True story: I've been eagerly awaiting a new Macbook to completely rid myself of Adobe software. Over the past decade I've considered in

I need this so badly. True story: I've been eagerly awaiting a new Macbook to completely rid myself of Adobe software. Over the past decade I've considered installing Adobe software but always held back because of how intrusive and shady the software is (I checked on friends' computers). I've been able to work around having to edit PDFs and used Figma in place of Photoshop for my very basic graphical needs. Well a few months ago I needed to fill out customs form 5106. This form uses some kind of proprietary Adobe PDF form creation software thing. In order to do anything with it I need Adobe Acrobat. At least that's how far my research took me before I buckled and purchased Adobe Acrobat. I was extremely busy that week and didn't have time to figure out a hacky alternative. After having installed Creative Cloud all I can say is... it's straight up malware. I doubt I'd be able to get rid of all the junk it installs even if I wanted to. And what's worse is the products are extremely buggy. It's just a mess! I just checked and Adobe has TWENTY EIGHT processes running in the background. A lot of them are running as root. And of course two of them are NodeJS servers. These processes are constantly phoning home at such a ridiculous rate that it's impossible to know what to block and what not to. Looking at Little Snitch right now, there are 13 distinct Adobe applications that have been making HTTP requests since I booted my laptop 30 minutes ago. I haven't used a single Adobe product since boot. I wasn't surprised when, after installing Creative Cloud and restarting my computer, next time I launched Chrome I got a popup telling me that Adobe installed an extension. THANK YOU GOOGLE for taking the time to alert me about this. At no point during the installation process was it clear to me that Adobe would be hijacking my browser too. I was going to do a fresh wipe to get rid of this junk for good but I wanted to wait until the Macbook was released. Once that laptop arrives I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it.

kayodelycaon 5y ago
> I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it. At this point I’m going to recommend a virtual machine.
- 0xFACEFEED 5y ago
  I could, but I think it would take considerable effort on my part. You know how it is. You end up with a long tail of little things that don't quite work properly. Eventually I could get it to work but I'm so upset with Adobe that I'm straight up boycotting their software. I'm ashamed of this but I've fantasized about berating Adobe executives/engineers to their face if I ever met them in real life. Of course I'd never ever do that but even fantasizing about berating someone felt dirty. That's how much time and sense of security this company has sucked from my life. I still haven't had to go through the process of cancelling my Creative Cloud subscription. I'm sooo hoping they didn't throw in a bunch of dark patterns in there as well but I have feeling they will.
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    > I still haven't had to go through the process of cancelling my Creative Cloud subscription. I'm sooo hoping they didn't throw in a bunch of dark patterns in there as well but I have feeling they will. Their gotcha that I know about is that their advertised price per month is actually a year subscription / 12, with the true monthly subscription hidden. When you cancel they’ll try to get you to pay out the remaining months of the year.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    I still haven't had to go through the process of cancelling my Creative Cloud subscription. I'm sooo hoping they didn't throw in a bunch of dark patterns in there as well but I have feeling they will. I dumped CC two months ago and was bracing for all kinds of shenanigans. But I was really surprised. Not only did it cancel immediately with no dark patterns, but I got a refund for the partially used month. I was only a month-to-month Photoshop subscriber ($13/month), so maybe it was easy for Adobe to let me go. Perhaps it's harder for higher value hostages... er... customers.
  - boraoztunc 5y ago
    ohh they def will. https://growth.design/case-studies/adobe-cancel-subscription https://growth.design/case-studies/adobe-cancel-subscription
pram 5y ago
It’s absolute cancer. My favorite part is the creative cloud app randomly taking up 4gb+ of ram doing literally nothing.
- 0xFACEFEED 5y ago
  I just force killed an Adobe installer running as root in the background. I don't know what it was installing or why.
  - neither_color 5y ago
    It'll be back. I spent an half an hour figuring out how to stop all these processes from re-spawning once and then in the next update they came back.
    - Washuu 5y ago
      I have Adobe's stuff mostly neutered on my Windows installation. No Adobe stuff is running unless I open an application. The worst is that Photoshop leaves a bunch of random crap running after closing and I have to manually kill each process.
neither_color 5y ago
>Once that laptop arrives I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it. If the ipad versions of illustrator and photoshop have the features you need that's the only way you can avoid all the nagware. I only need to do the occasional edit to a logo or photo so the ipad pro versions are enough and I prefer the pen to a mouse. I've stopped using them on desktop and use https://smallpdf.com https://smallpdf.com for editing and signing pdfs.
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  This is an excellent Mac PDF editing tool. I'm not affiliated, just a user. https://pdfexpert.com https://pdfexpert.com I was editing pdf drafts from a publisher and just couldn't stand another minute of dealing with Acrobat. Found this, removed all vestiges of Adobe, and haven't looked back. I've used Preview a lot, but it just isn't reliable (for me). Apple seems to muck around with the code every couple of versions and break things. Odd.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Noped out. 1) Defaulted to setting PDFExpert as my PDF viewer, 2) followed with a survey I could not close out, 3) required an account to begin. I'm happy it works for you but I'm tired of the modern software that wants accounts, your data....
    - 0x38B 5y ago
      I'm not surprised by this. Readdle's apps, namely 'Documents', have always been my go-to on iOS for editing PDFs and transferring files[1]. But they went and added a useless VPN to Documents, then released a 're-design' which cuts functionality (and from the reviews is quite buggy). It's sad to see a quality app degrade as the developer adds bloat and new 'features'. 1: For example, Documents (which edits PDFs as well) has a built-in WebDav server that is super useful for getting files between an iPhone and a Linux machine over Wifi.
  - hanche 5y ago
josephg 5y ago
> Well a few months ago I needed to fill out customs form 5106. This form uses some kind of proprietary Adobe PDF form creation software thing PSA in case anyone doesn't know this: the built-in Preview app on MacOS can be used to fill in any PDF form. You can type into text boxes on some forms. But even if they're not there, you can add text anywhere on a pdf. You just have to drag your own text boxes to wherever you want to type. It also supports signatures and various shapes. The options are sort of hidden - View -> "Show Annotation Toolbar" or Tools -> Annotate -> Text. You shouldn't ever need adobe acrobat.
- tuzed 5y ago
  That’s not entirely true. Some government forms where I live are shared in a PDF format but are only downloaded and displayed properly when they are opened in Acrobat, and otherwise display a page telling you to download acrobat. I suspect this allows the form to be updated, and see why it might be done, but I still find it very annoying.
  - fingerlocks 5y ago
    I've never seen this before, and I've been using the Preview method described above for 15+ years. I have also never installed an Adobe product on a mac, ever. Do you have a link to a file that can produce this error in Mac Preview? It would be fun to learn how to bypass that.
    - hobos_delight 5y ago
      All / most PDF forms used by the Australian Defence Force are like this - I suspect it’s because it’s all tied into the identity / ability to digitally sign the forms. It’s very frustrating when you send someone (externally) a PDF and it required them to install Acrobat. Or maybe it’s just Adobe trying to take the P out of PDF…
      - bombcar 5y ago
        The PDF format supports all sorts of insane extensions only implemented in Acrobat and only used by governments and large enterprises.
ttul 5y ago
I know this may seem extreme, but you could always run Adobe in a separate MacOS user login to keep it sandboxed. When you don’t need Adobe, just log that user out…
- speed_spread 5y ago
  If some processes are running as root, there's no guarantee that they won't fork+daemonize and still be running when you login with your regular user. On Windows, it's become a habit for some apps to install their own "Update Service" as part of the regular app installation.
- Hemospectrum 5y ago
  This won’t really help against the numerous background processes that run as root (as mentioned above).
insta_anon 5y ago
Totally agree, Creative Cloud by now is really one of the worst pieces of software ever created. Because we are on this topic - what is a great alternative to Photoshop that uses mostly similar concepts? I’ve tried Affinity Photo but simply doing some photo cropping worked completely differently than PS and took me a long time to figure out. My main use case is having a photo, doing a selection overlay and running „cut via copy“, then deleting the underlying layer, nothing too complicated :)
- rrrhys 5y ago
  Photopea is an excellent, free web app photoshop clone that is worth a try. https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
- mattkevan 5y ago
  Pixelmator Pro is good. Prefer it over Affinity Photo. It’s lightweight and powerful with lots of smart ML-assisted features.
- beermonster 5y ago
  Have you tried digiKam and/or darktable ?
forgotmyoldname 5y ago
I use Photoshop for art. Unfortunately, all other desktop software just isn't good, but thankfully Procreate is absolutely amazing software that I can use on my iPad (if you're reading this, devs, please port it to macOS. There are countless artists that'll pay to switch to a non-subscription based, non-Adobe piece of software that doesn't suck). But for desktop, I really have no choice but to buy into the Adobe scheme. But yes, Creative Cloud is seriously completely fucking nuts. It's shit I do not and will not ever need or want for any reason and exists just to burn through my electric bill and contribute to climate change. Trying to find ways to disable it gives you cheeky employees who post marketing fluff about how it enables consumer whatever BS, but nobody can explain what those 8 dozen background tasks are doing or why we can't disable it. I resorted to just deleting parts of the software package one by one. Most background tasks are gone. I made the mistake of updating one (1) time and the number of background tasks doubled. Absolute insanity. Nearly gigabytes of memory swallowed and CPU cycles wasted doing nothing. For all I know, it's nothing but crypto mining processes--and honestly, it probably is since Adobe has shown themselves to be money hungry and absolutely nobody can or will say what those processes are.
- zephyr9 5y ago
  > I use Photoshop for art. Unfortunately, all other desktop software just isn't good I see this "I've tried one solution and I'm all out of ideas" approach a lot. I used Photoshop for many years. Pixelmator is hands down better than Photoshop in every regard and much cheaper.
  - forgotmyoldname 5y ago
    > I see this "I've tried one solution and I'm all out of ideas" approach a lot. Not sure where you've seen it, because it sure wasn't in my post. I've tried the alternatives. I once (regretfully) paid for Pixelmator. I tried Krita. I suffered through GIMP. I've fiddled with Clip Studio Paint. Photoshop is quite simply better, more full-featured, and stable. Pixelmator would crash fairly often and I'd lose progress. The others just don't have good UI, and in GIMP's case, it's outright user-hostile. I've managed to switch most of my software to free/cheaper alternatives (Blender has improved a lot lately and I was glad to leave Maya), but when it comes to 2D art on desktops, Photoshop is unfortunately still the best.
vbezhenar 5y ago
> two of them are NodeJS servers. At least they're not Java Spring servers. That's the software I had to install to fill my tax form in my country. I suggest you to use virtual machines for those kinds of tasks. That's what I'm doing.
boraoztunc 5y ago
This is really frustrating for me as well, I've been manually killing CC processes for so long that it became a usual task in my workflow, a daily habit. Adobe is one of the companies I hate soo much for this shady moves, and I'm stuck with its softwares involuntarily. But decision is made, I'm upgrading to a new macbook pro soon and will change my design tools. At least I'll try hard before installing creative cloud.
chanc3e 5y ago
This is absolutely my experience of Adobe software too. Terribly engineered with priorities weighted for the board rather than users. I’ve been a designer for +20 years and sans-Adobe for five, I absolutely recommend any young designers to avoid the Adobe workflow. You don’t need it. Photoshop = Pixelmator (Kitura is also very good) Illustrator/Indesign = Affinity Designer Highly precise vectors I draw in Glyphs/Fontlab.
- jer0me 5y ago
  Just to add to this list: Gravit Designer is quite good for small vector projects, though it is a subscription. Adobe Lightroom (the new one) and possibly more can be installed from the App Store without all the Creative Cloud bloat.
  - chanc3e 5y ago
    Gravit is new on me. I'm bias against web apps, but it's very cool a someone is playing in that space. Thanks! It's beautiful to see that inside a decade we've gone from having a monoculture of Illustrator as the sole vector app (post freehand) to having multiple very capable competitors on all platforms.
orionblastar 5y ago
LibreOffice has Draw which can handle PDF files. It can edit and modify them and save them. The price is free https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/
- beermonster 5y ago
  This is what I use when I need to edit PDFs. Works a treat.
shp0ngle 5y ago
I only install Adobe stuff on iOS. I can be reasonably sure they won't do shady stuff there. Their Acrobat PDF thing works on iOS as well as on Mac.
roosgit 5y ago
Yes, Adobe is bad. The way I got around this problem was to: 1. Download a Windows 10 virtual machine. It's free. 2. Download Acrobat Pro 2020 Trial for Windows. It has a full installation kit. 3. Install the virtual machine. But don't give it an internet connection. 4. Copy the Acrobat kit to the virtual machine and install it. 5. Make a snapshot of the virtual machine. When the trial expires restore the virtual machine. It will cost you 30GB of space and 1 hour or so, but Adobe will be contained at least.
irae 5y ago
Yeah, Office got a lot better, but Adobe is still plain malware. Here is one way to work around it: - Create a new partition, install macOS and have each bootable partition have its own different FileVault password for encryption. - You can have a Adobe + other nononsencial software partition, and you can bail from typing your real partition encryption key, so your main data is secured from Adobe I am not a security expert, but I did this for a while and it works well. It is annoying, but I felt my privacy was not at risk while I was booted on the "dirty partition". Edit: I did it to use Premiere. PDF might be doable without that hassle as others pointed out.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  I don't know how Adobe could fall that deep. Their sales probably still don't reflect that because they have a lot of momentum but I hear our designers really getting angry.
IIsi50MHz 5y ago
For natural media, Corel Painter, not getting much mention these days?
srigi 5y ago
I'm thinking if, for these "one-off" tasks doable only with very special SW, we could utilize that APFS snapshoting feature of macOS filesystem. 1. Create snapshot 2. Install obtrusive SW, finish task 3. Restore snapshot. Any sources for this kinds of workflow?

kayodelycaon 5y ago

> I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it. At this point I’m going to recommend a virtual machine.

0xFACEFEED 5y ago
I could, but I think it would take considerable effort on my part. You know how it is. You end up with a long tail of little things that don't quite work properly. Eventually I could get it to work but I'm so upset with Adobe that I'm straight up boycotting their software. I'm ashamed of this but I've fantasized about berating Adobe executives/engineers to their face if I ever met them in real life. Of course I'd never ever do that but even fantasizing about berating someone felt dirty. That's how much time and sense of security this company has sucked from my life. I still haven't had to go through the process of cancelling my Creative Cloud subscription. I'm sooo hoping they didn't throw in a bunch of dark patterns in there as well but I have feeling they will.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  > I still haven't had to go through the process of cancelling my Creative Cloud subscription. I'm sooo hoping they didn't throw in a bunch of dark patterns in there as well but I have feeling they will. Their gotcha that I know about is that their advertised price per month is actually a year subscription / 12, with the true monthly subscription hidden. When you cancel they’ll try to get you to pay out the remaining months of the year.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I still haven't had to go through the process of cancelling my Creative Cloud subscription. I'm sooo hoping they didn't throw in a bunch of dark patterns in there as well but I have feeling they will. I dumped CC two months ago and was bracing for all kinds of shenanigans. But I was really surprised. Not only did it cancel immediately with no dark patterns, but I got a refund for the partially used month. I was only a month-to-month Photoshop subscriber ($13/month), so maybe it was easy for Adobe to let me go. Perhaps it's harder for higher value hostages... er... customers.
- boraoztunc 5y ago
  ohh they def will. https://growth.design/case-studies/adobe-cancel-subscription https://growth.design/case-studies/adobe-cancel-subscription

pram 5y ago

It’s absolute cancer. My favorite part is the creative cloud app randomly taking up 4gb+ of ram doing literally nothing.

0xFACEFEED 5y ago
I just force killed an Adobe installer running as root in the background. I don't know what it was installing or why.
- neither_color 5y ago
  It'll be back. I spent an half an hour figuring out how to stop all these processes from re-spawning once and then in the next update they came back.
  - Washuu 5y ago
    I have Adobe's stuff mostly neutered on my Windows installation. No Adobe stuff is running unless I open an application. The worst is that Photoshop leaves a bunch of random crap running after closing and I have to manually kill each process.

neither_color 5y ago

>Once that laptop arrives I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it. If the ipad versions of illustrator and photoshop have the features you need that's the only way you can avoid all the nagware. I only need to do the occasional edit to a logo or photo so the ipad pro versions are enough and I prefer the pen to a mouse. I've stopped using them on desktop and use https://smallpdf.com https://smallpdf.com for editing and signing pdfs.

dev_tty01 5y ago
This is an excellent Mac PDF editing tool. I'm not affiliated, just a user. https://pdfexpert.com https://pdfexpert.com I was editing pdf drafts from a publisher and just couldn't stand another minute of dealing with Acrobat. Found this, removed all vestiges of Adobe, and haven't looked back. I've used Preview a lot, but it just isn't reliable (for me). Apple seems to muck around with the code every couple of versions and break things. Odd.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Noped out. 1) Defaulted to setting PDFExpert as my PDF viewer, 2) followed with a survey I could not close out, 3) required an account to begin. I'm happy it works for you but I'm tired of the modern software that wants accounts, your data....
  - 0x38B 5y ago
    I'm not surprised by this. Readdle's apps, namely 'Documents', have always been my go-to on iOS for editing PDFs and transferring files[1]. But they went and added a useless VPN to Documents, then released a 're-design' which cuts functionality (and from the reviews is quite buggy). It's sad to see a quality app degrade as the developer adds bloat and new 'features'. 1: For example, Documents (which edits PDFs as well) has a built-in WebDav server that is super useful for getting files between an iPhone and a Linux machine over Wifi.
- hanche 5y ago

josephg 5y ago

> Well a few months ago I needed to fill out customs form 5106. This form uses some kind of proprietary Adobe PDF form creation software thing PSA in case anyone doesn't know this: the built-in Preview app on MacOS can be used to fill in any PDF form. You can type into text boxes on some forms. But even if they're not there, you can add text anywhere on a pdf. You just have to drag your own text boxes to wherever you want to type. It also supports signatures and various shapes. The options are sort of hidden - View -> "Show Annotation Toolbar" or Tools -> Annotate -> Text. You shouldn't ever need adobe acrobat.

tuzed 5y ago
That’s not entirely true. Some government forms where I live are shared in a PDF format but are only downloaded and displayed properly when they are opened in Acrobat, and otherwise display a page telling you to download acrobat. I suspect this allows the form to be updated, and see why it might be done, but I still find it very annoying.
- fingerlocks 5y ago
  I've never seen this before, and I've been using the Preview method described above for 15+ years. I have also never installed an Adobe product on a mac, ever. Do you have a link to a file that can produce this error in Mac Preview? It would be fun to learn how to bypass that.
  - hobos_delight 5y ago
    All / most PDF forms used by the Australian Defence Force are like this - I suspect it’s because it’s all tied into the identity / ability to digitally sign the forms. It’s very frustrating when you send someone (externally) a PDF and it required them to install Acrobat. Or maybe it’s just Adobe trying to take the P out of PDF…
    - bombcar 5y ago
      The PDF format supports all sorts of insane extensions only implemented in Acrobat and only used by governments and large enterprises.

ttul 5y ago

I know this may seem extreme, but you could always run Adobe in a separate MacOS user login to keep it sandboxed. When you don’t need Adobe, just log that user out…

speed_spread 5y ago
If some processes are running as root, there's no guarantee that they won't fork+daemonize and still be running when you login with your regular user. On Windows, it's become a habit for some apps to install their own "Update Service" as part of the regular app installation.
Hemospectrum 5y ago
This won’t really help against the numerous background processes that run as root (as mentioned above).

insta_anon 5y ago

Totally agree, Creative Cloud by now is really one of the worst pieces of software ever created. Because we are on this topic - what is a great alternative to Photoshop that uses mostly similar concepts? I’ve tried Affinity Photo but simply doing some photo cropping worked completely differently than PS and took me a long time to figure out. My main use case is having a photo, doing a selection overlay and running „cut via copy“, then deleting the underlying layer, nothing too complicated :)

rrrhys 5y ago
Photopea is an excellent, free web app photoshop clone that is worth a try. https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/
mattkevan 5y ago
Pixelmator Pro is good. Prefer it over Affinity Photo. It’s lightweight and powerful with lots of smart ML-assisted features.
beermonster 5y ago
Have you tried digiKam and/or darktable ?

forgotmyoldname 5y ago

I use Photoshop for art. Unfortunately, all other desktop software just isn't good, but thankfully Procreate is absolutely amazing software that I can use on my iPad (if you're reading this, devs, please port it to macOS. There are countless artists that'll pay to switch to a non-subscription based, non-Adobe piece of software that doesn't suck). But for desktop, I really have no choice but to buy into the Adobe scheme. But yes, Creative Cloud is seriously completely fucking nuts. It's shit I do not and will not ever need or want for any reason and exists just to burn through my electric bill and contribute to climate change. Trying to find ways to disable it gives you cheeky employees who post marketing fluff about how it enables consumer whatever BS, but nobody can explain what those 8 dozen background tasks are doing or why we can't disable it. I resorted to just deleting parts of the software package one by one. Most background tasks are gone. I made the mistake of updating one (1) time and the number of background tasks doubled. Absolute insanity. Nearly gigabytes of memory swallowed and CPU cycles wasted doing nothing. For all I know, it's nothing but crypto mining processes--and honestly, it probably is since Adobe has shown themselves to be money hungry and absolutely nobody can or will say what those processes are.

zephyr9 5y ago
> I use Photoshop for art. Unfortunately, all other desktop software just isn't good I see this "I've tried one solution and I'm all out of ideas" approach a lot. I used Photoshop for many years. Pixelmator is hands down better than Photoshop in every regard and much cheaper.
- forgotmyoldname 5y ago
  > I see this "I've tried one solution and I'm all out of ideas" approach a lot. Not sure where you've seen it, because it sure wasn't in my post. I've tried the alternatives. I once (regretfully) paid for Pixelmator. I tried Krita. I suffered through GIMP. I've fiddled with Clip Studio Paint. Photoshop is quite simply better, more full-featured, and stable. Pixelmator would crash fairly often and I'd lose progress. The others just don't have good UI, and in GIMP's case, it's outright user-hostile. I've managed to switch most of my software to free/cheaper alternatives (Blender has improved a lot lately and I was glad to leave Maya), but when it comes to 2D art on desktops, Photoshop is unfortunately still the best.

vbezhenar 5y ago

> two of them are NodeJS servers. At least they're not Java Spring servers. That's the software I had to install to fill my tax form in my country. I suggest you to use virtual machines for those kinds of tasks. That's what I'm doing.

boraoztunc 5y ago

This is really frustrating for me as well, I've been manually killing CC processes for so long that it became a usual task in my workflow, a daily habit. Adobe is one of the companies I hate soo much for this shady moves, and I'm stuck with its softwares involuntarily. But decision is made, I'm upgrading to a new macbook pro soon and will change my design tools. At least I'll try hard before installing creative cloud.

chanc3e 5y ago

This is absolutely my experience of Adobe software too. Terribly engineered with priorities weighted for the board rather than users. I’ve been a designer for +20 years and sans-Adobe for five, I absolutely recommend any young designers to avoid the Adobe workflow. You don’t need it. Photoshop = Pixelmator (Kitura is also very good) Illustrator/Indesign = Affinity Designer Highly precise vectors I draw in Glyphs/Fontlab.

jer0me 5y ago
Just to add to this list: Gravit Designer is quite good for small vector projects, though it is a subscription. Adobe Lightroom (the new one) and possibly more can be installed from the App Store without all the Creative Cloud bloat.
- chanc3e 5y ago
  Gravit is new on me. I'm bias against web apps, but it's very cool a someone is playing in that space. Thanks! It's beautiful to see that inside a decade we've gone from having a monoculture of Illustrator as the sole vector app (post freehand) to having multiple very capable competitors on all platforms.

orionblastar 5y ago

LibreOffice has Draw which can handle PDF files. It can edit and modify them and save them. The price is free https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/

beermonster 5y ago
This is what I use when I need to edit PDFs. Works a treat.

shp0ngle 5y ago

I only install Adobe stuff on iOS. I can be reasonably sure they won't do shady stuff there. Their Acrobat PDF thing works on iOS as well as on Mac.

roosgit 5y ago

Yes, Adobe is bad. The way I got around this problem was to: 1. Download a Windows 10 virtual machine. It's free. 2. Download Acrobat Pro 2020 Trial for Windows. It has a full installation kit. 3. Install the virtual machine. But don't give it an internet connection. 4. Copy the Acrobat kit to the virtual machine and install it. 5. Make a snapshot of the virtual machine. When the trial expires restore the virtual machine. It will cost you 30GB of space and 1 hour or so, but Adobe will be contained at least.

irae 5y ago

Yeah, Office got a lot better, but Adobe is still plain malware. Here is one way to work around it: - Create a new partition, install macOS and have each bootable partition have its own different FileVault password for encryption. - You can have a Adobe + other nononsencial software partition, and you can bail from typing your real partition encryption key, so your main data is secured from Adobe I am not a security expert, but I did this for a while and it works well. It is annoying, but I felt my privacy was not at risk while I was booted on the "dirty partition". Edit: I did it to use Premiere. PDF might be doable without that hassle as others pointed out.

raxxorrax 5y ago
I don't know how Adobe could fall that deep. Their sales probably still don't reflect that because they have a lot of momentum but I hear our designers really getting angry.

IIsi50MHz 5y ago

For natural media, Corel Painter, not getting much mention these days?

srigi 5y ago

I'm thinking if, for these "one-off" tasks doable only with very special SW, we could utilize that APFS snapshoting feature of macOS filesystem. 1. Create snapshot 2. Install obtrusive SW, finish task 3. Restore snapshot. Any sources for this kinds of workflow?