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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It does get by the "Please wait..." that you get in Preview or Chrome but Firefox 93.0 doesn't actually load the form properly (e.g. it's 6 pages in Acrobat but only 3 pages in Firefox and those 3 pages aren't even rendered properly).
Which version? For me 90.0 shows the "Please wait" message which some JavaScript or something is supposed to replace, and 93.0 force downloads it, even when I try to open it from a local file.
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…
They may not be accepted by the form issuer if they have a process to pull the text out of specific fields in the PDF. I have run into that before. They are not just looking at the document but processing it.
You might try filing you FBAR, which if you get wrong results in criminal penalties, and which (practically) every American living overseas needs to complete each year:
My employer uses a training and document system (third party) that requires the use of Acrobat to view PDFs. I never have to fill out forms within the PDFs; I simply can't open the files via Preview (or Firefox). Apparently the provider inserts JavaScript into the published documents (which, I assume, track document usage, since it is a training system).
Also, I can't post a link to the document, since it contains proprietary training materials.
Yes, I've had to fill out similar forms for submitting a manuscript to Nature Publishing Group journals. It seemed to me like the entire PDF was being dynamically generated via JS code or something. E.g. I would check a box for human subjects research and it would just add the relevant section to the form, re-adjusting the pagination on the fly.
Yes, the US polar programs physical qualification forms are like this, making me either use a VM or use my wife's laptop (since no supported acrobat for Linux).
Some of the, especially government, form utilize what I think is some kind of Acrobat Forms QR code generation to create a machine-readable representation of the form. This isn't supported in Preview.
Further, PDF is a monstrous format which includes its own variant of ECMA script built in. I think its pretty unrealistic to expect Apple to cleanroom the whole "standard" so I'm not too upset. They've got probably 90% of the way there, but it's unfortunately not every form.
For Canadians, PPT-054 is a good example [1] - notice $Form$054 and so on in the upper right corner. I can't remember which off hand but either the US I-131 or I-765 has one, too. Unfortunately I-131 isn't even loading in Safari for me at the moment.
Yep, this has been my experience too. I remember having such a hard time trying to fill out a form I-9 for starting a new job last year that I had to not only download Acrobat, but for reasons I no longer recall I had to BUY A NEW PRINTER and PRINT the damn thing on paper to fill it out by hand! Absolutely batshit crazy nonsense!
People need to be very careful with this, because not only are there some PDF formats that only work with Acrobat, but I've encountered issues where the PDF opens correctly in Preview, and you can fill them just fine, but if you save it and send it, and the person opens your filled PDF in Acrobat, the text you entered will be completely jumbled.
If a PDF is meant to be printed, who cares, but if you're sending it to someone, make sure to open it in Acrobat and check if it's formatted correctly; ideally, make it in Acrobat.
For Wimdows/Linux users LibreOffice Draw also mostly works for this. Its clunkey, and there are exceptions, but generally you can drop a textbox wherever you need, then re-export as a pdf when you're done.
Sadly, I had to install Adobe Acrobat reader last week to print a tiled PDF. The PDF itself was poster sized, but I needed to print it out on a normal 8.5x11” printer. Preview didn’t support doing that, but Reader did.
This works to make a form that looks okay on your screen or when printed. It will not make a form that works correctly if the recipient wants to process it using proprietary Acrobat features.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Affinity Photo is pretty good though it may not suit your needs. I know you already tried it but Clip Studio is very powerful if you stick with it (possibly depending on what art you’re making)
I agree that Pixelmator Pro is fantastic. However, I'm not an advanced photoshop(-like) user or photographer in the slightest, so there may be some advanced features in modern versions of Photoshop that Pixelmator, being a product from a much smaller company, just can't ship as fast or as well. I'm not outright saying there absolutely are, just saying that's possible.
As for other alternatives, I've had good experiences with Affinity Design for vector work. Sketch is a favorite with many designers as well (although I personally am not fond of its workflow/concepts but that's just me, clearly it works for most folks). GIMP, while venerable, is aptly named because it's so butt-ugly nobody with any actual artistic talent cares to use it. Seriously, never have I seen anything created with GIMP that looks, aesthetically, competitive with designs created with commercial tools (this isn't the fault of the functionality within GIMP, just an unfortunate side effect of having engineers do art; we suck at that). I've heard good things about Krita but haven't used it seriously because the other tools here do a great job so I've never had to bother.
It's a damn shame Photoshop and other Adobe tools are essntially malware these days. They used to be fantastic back in the day.
I swear I still have left-hand muscle memory for Photoshop editing baked into my hand even now, 20 years since I last used it routinely. ESC, hold space, click + drag, V, hover, click to select layer...
>but thankfully Procreate is absolutely amazing software that I can use on my iPad
There seems to be a recurring praise for ProCreate. At least every time Photoshop comes up ProCreate is mentioned. ( I even have to search they are not coming from the same user )
I guess I will have to add it to list of research topics.
Question from someone who doesn't know about this stuff - If I need photoshop can I get away with an old version pre creative cloud - cs5 or 6 or something?
I think on a Mac you'd struggle to get anything to pre-creative cloud to execute. Windows might be a different story?
If you are doing basic PS work - the open source alternatives are more than capable. Some non-adobe applications can open PSD files in a reasonably sane fashion.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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 for editing and signing pdfs.
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.
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.
I’ve been usding PDFpen pro for years. It is pricey, but I have used it enough for it to be worth the expense. It was recently sold off to a different company, though. Hopefully without ill effects.
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…
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.
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.