this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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As someone who has a full FOSS stack, can you explain to a non-graphic-design techie like me why people are so allergic to the FOSS alternatives? I just don't know enough about design to understand why people will put up with so much abuse from Adobe when there are completely free alternatives that are not weighed down by AI and actually respect your privacy.
Dude, you keep asking this question throughout the post and I don’t think you’re going to get an answer that satisfies you.
The short answer is industry inertia and professionals not realizing the amount of power they gave away to toolmakers of their profession through the computer age.
Long answer is most people use these tools to work and the vast majority of paid professional work doesn’t happen in a vacuum and is, in fact, a team effort. So that effectively sets the floor and ceiling for use and adoption. Remember, most real people who get paid real money don’t give a shit about which software package or which version of whatever-the-fuck. In fact, they’d rather most of that bleed away so that they only have to think about what they got hired to think about. Also Bob the CISO really fucking hates anything that ends in .py.
That is the most satisfying answer yet.
Sorry for soapboxing. I get a little spicy when discussing intellectual property rights.
It's because Adobe truly does have the best feature set. It's partly because they spent so many years building good software, and partly because they own patents that prevent other tools from operating in some of the same ways.
Adobe applications are interoperable. I can seamlessly move content between them. They all have the same interface and work in basically the same way. I can (and have) put together a 300 page book while taking advantage of many advanced automations. And back before Adobe went to shit, they really did put a lot of effort into making their interfaces intuitive.
And when you have 25 years of muscle memory dedicated to a set of tools, it's REALLY difficult to completely replace your whole tool set.