Shoutouts
Thanks to the following commenters below for additional recommendations that I added to this post!
- bruhduh
- Toes
Free Open Source Alternatives
[Visual/Graphical]
For all visual/graphical artists I would personally recommend switching from Photoshop over to
- KDE’s Krita
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- GIMP
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
[Audio]
For audio migration I’d recommend switching from Soundbooth to
- Tenacity
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- LMMS
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
[PDF]
Acrobat Reader to
- MuPDF
- Licensed under: AGPLv-3.0 or later
- F-Droid
- KDE’s Okular
- Licensed under: GPLv-2.0 or later
- Flathub
[Video]
Premiere to
- Shotcut
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- Kdenlive
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 or later
- Flathub
- OpenShot
- Licensed under: GPLv-3.0 only
- Flathub
- Status: “Unverified”
There’s also an excellent thread started by [email protected]
Relevent XKCD : https://xkcd.com/743/
I haven’t used Adobe’s suite since the late 1990s. I use GIMP.
However. I also don’t do graphic design work on a daily basis.
Adobe’s software packages are…I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I’m going to call them “expert software”. That is, they’re in large part designed for people who heavily use the software package day-in and day-out. “Expert software” is stuff that has deep feature sets that you spend a long time learning. Emacs is a great example in software engineering. Adobe Photoshop in graphic design. They often support some level of macro functionality, automation, add-on software, configurable interface, etc.
The thing is that all of the time that a user of one of these software packages spends building expertise also kind of locks them into the thing. Telling someone to “just use GIMP” instead of Photoshop…yeah, they have roughly-similar functionality, but there’s a lot of finely-honed workflow to break.
And those people have deadlines and stuff that they’re working under, and estimates based on their familiarity with throughput in the package that they know.
That doesn’t mean that someone can’t switch, or even that it’s a bad idea to do so. But…there’s gonna be friction for 'em. If you’ve spent 15 years optimizing your workflow, maybe it’s not starting from scratch, 15 years to do so on a similar software package. There’s overlap. But it’s not overnight, either.
I had a coworker who was design lead on a product. I remember how exasperated he got with some kind of very subtle placement behavior differences between GIMP and Photoshop, because he’d gotten very used to the Photoshop workflow that he’d built up.
Workflow is big, but it isn’t the biggest issue with Gimp for serious work, the destructive editing is. Workflow you can get used to, destructive editing means you’re fucked if you need to edit something you’ve previously edited - something most if not all professionals do all the time.
This.
It is planned feature for Gimp 3 I believe, hopefully it will be implemented well.
But for now, people that aren’t professional graphic designers should really stop recommending Gimp as a viable replacement. It is a very capable piece of software, but too many professional-grade features are missing.
And it’s never only about Photoshop either. It is the integration that the suite has. Illustrator to Photoshop to Indesign is (mostly) seemless.
I’m currently trying to switch to foss alternatives, but it’s rough.
Recently tried kdenlive because I had some trouble with premiere. It was surprisingly good. The problem is, DaVinci Resolve is much better than either premiere or kdenlive and while it’s not open source, it is free. And sadly I won’t be able to use either one for work because our projects need to be shareable among colleagues, in case someone else has to finish an edit for you, and premiere is the program everyone knows well.
Also, both gimp and krita, while being the best OS alternative for PS are still much worse. Especially gimp is overly complicated and user unfriendly.
Not open source, but pro grade, often nicer to work with than adobe stuff. The Affinity suite. Pay once per major revision. Decent upgrade plans. No subscription. Designer, photo and publisher.
The business model could change very quickly and promises by companies aren’t worth the paper they are written on. The CEO might tomorrow decide to sell the company to a large tech company which more often than not leads to the destruction of the software the company developed. Only open source or, even better, free software can guarantee that your software wont be enshittified.
They’ve actually been acquired a few months ago, they promised no changes to their business model but I’m not hopeful
They will boil that frog slowly. Soon there will be an alternative subscription with a discount for previous license holders. Then they hide the option to buy a perpetual license so only people who spent time to search for it can find it; and finally they will remove the option completely and claim that they did that because “Nobody was buying it”.
Whoever bought into the whole cloud crap won’t care.
I care, but I don’t know how else to edit my photos on my phone and seamlessly back them up.
I use Lightroom on a Google Pixel. It costs $10/mo for a terabyte of storage and an editor that’s constantly being updated. I’m not arguing that it’s the best option, I just don’t know any solid alternatives.
If anyone else has a solution this use case, essentially the same as someone who wants to leave Google Photos’ storage/editing suite, I’d be happy to ditch Adobe.
Edit: a word
I use digiKam as the replacement for Lightrooms photo management tools.
I used darktable as a replacement for Lightroom’s photo editing tools.
I use a hosted Photoprism install for making the photos available online, sharing with friends/family etc.
This is almost what I do, but could you elaborate on how you use digicam for management?
Digikam has really strong tagging, searching and workflow tools. So I import to Digikam, sort by quality, reject/approve and tag in Digikam, and I use it to launch specific photos in to darktable for editing.
Just to mention a not-foss, but extremely well done DAW, cheap ($60 personal use, $225 commercial) and goes through 2 major versions before you’d need to pay again, free to download and try WinRAR style, supported on windows, macos, and Linux, etc, etc - reaper.
If you need a solid DAW, with support for all kinds of plugins and a dev team that’s not a bag of dicks trying to screw you over with a cloud subscription and AI, this is it.
Until it gets bought by some big corp and suddenly has spyware integrated and goes into subscription anyway Happened to a lot of good proprietary software, and this is a reason why open source is superior.
WinRAR style
So we basically never have to pay?
No, just a nag. If you’re recording/editing a few times a year, it won’t be a bother. If you’re in there often, it’s worth the few bucks.
