> I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard
Nope. Been using Photoshop since version 1, AfterEffects since its inception (by a company called Cosa AFAIR) and InDesign since version 1. 30+ years give or take.
There all indeed so slow and bloated that they feel mostly unusable to me today.
And it's the opposite. It got to this over the last 10–15 years. Except Are. That was always slow but for motion graphics it's hard to get around it.
All the freelance VFX artists I know use old versions of PS and Ae.
InDesign is so buggy that I switched to Affinity three years ago.
Only younger people, who never experienced the snappy desktop systems & software of the 90's or early 2000's, think the state of things today is somehow normal.
Not version 1 but I've been on it since Photoshop 3 and have had the exact opposite experience. It was rough early on, crashed frequently and often. Got better around Photoshop 4/5 then had another rough period.
I've found the latest Creative Cloud versions to be the most stable. I cannot recall a single Photoshop crash.
I spend a good amount of time in Photoshop and I disagree that it’s slow and bloated, in general.
I know after a new version a year or two ago some actions were noticeably slower, but I complained to the project manager on Reddit on the specifics and it got tightened back up pretty quickly.
Also, anyone using old versions of Photoshop are missing out. Both the new Remove tool along with the generative AI fill are absolute gamechangers.
The solution is to just to avoid adobe stuff as much as possible. A lot of what would be done in photoshop can be done in nuke and after effects can just be thrown in the trash when using nuke.
Yep. In my experience CS1 and CS2 are somehow more responsive feeling running on now-ancient and comparably resource-bare hardware like PPC G5 or Core 2 Duo Macs than PS CC is on a modern armed-to-the-teeth workstation, which is ridiculous.
The bloat was ramping up pretty aggressively through CS3, CS4, and CS5 but the shift to subscription model really gave Adobe a license to not care about efficiency or UI snappiness.
> I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard.
They massively increased the complexity of their products after introducing the Creative Cloud. It's an absolute mess that can cause delays in Microsoft (!) just to make the new Windows release work with it. And Photoshop in particular has the byzantine PSD format that requires them to keep old versions of the code to read old versions of the format.
Adobe software in general resembles Windows nowadays - they are trying to modernize it but legacy decisions keep them from doing too much, as they can't break backward compatibility, their entire business model depends on keeping the users locked in. As a result, their old software is a terrible mishmash of UIs from different eras.
So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?