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I’d argue it’s better to use actual alternatives. Half of the issue with free and open source software is that it’s userbase is too small. If more people used it, it could actually improve in many ways.
Lets take gaming on Linux as an example. The userbase on steam is somewhere around 5%. So there is almost no incentive for developers to make games that run nativly on Linux. Its actually easier to run the games in a compatibility layer then to get a Linux port of a game. And although wine and proton work incredibly well, sometimes even running a game better than on windows; a Linux native version of every game would be ideal. Which will never happen with such a small userbase.
Next you have the terrible business practices of these companies. Even if you use the pirated versions. You are in their ecosystem and their community. You increase their profitability and their stock price simply by continuing the industry standard.
Pirated versions of software like this is excusable if you need it for work or sometihing. But imagine if instead of staying with the status quo, you use and help improve actual free and open source alternatives. Versons of software that don’t steal your data or monetize how you use it by selling your input to others or stealing it for “AI” datasets.
Imagine using free and open source software that gives you feedom because your data stays on your devices, your creations belong to only yourself or who ypu choose to share it with, and you work with others to improve it; even if it’s by just submitting bug reports. Imagine using something like that which you find so altruisticly beneficial that instead of pirating the software that has no respect for you, you donate money to the devs of free and open source software. Yes, I’m a pirate. But I do donate money to the right causes and something that protects my freedom is worth both my time and my money.
This person fucks!!
I agree with everything, but want to add that 5% is actually a huge incentive and I’m very very optimistic about the future of linux gaming.
This is also data from an opt-in survey of only one kind of user. The real number of Linux users is probably somewhat higher due to the higher level of privacy conscientiousness in the community.
Yeah, but the gaming isn’t bad on Linux.
I agree. I only use linux. Which includes for gaming. And I game a lot.
This is how we got these monopolies in the first place.
free* as in beer, not as in speech. we still don’t really own it.
Just take it and move to another start system.
And learn assembly
Wrong. I and other devs can modify free software to make it work on Linux. You can’t do that with Photoshop and Premiere
But you don’t need it to run on linux if you’re using a personally stripped down LTSC Windows install activated for free using massgrave.
More seriously, two different meanings of free going on here.
With only one having your interests at heart. An easy choice.
Good luck running a tiling WM like Hyprland with a wonderful Terminal emulator like Foot or Kitty, with a customisable file manager like Thunar or Krusader, with a terminal music player like CMUS…
I can keep on going. But the TLDR is that it’s MY setup not Microsoft’s.
Pirating a software still shows a company that there is interest in it. They will only know they are screwed when people stop buying and stop pirating
Zorin OS, Gimp, and the last one looks like Blender or DaVinci software.
Gimp is terrible. The UX is bad, the whole project just seems like an afterthought
I used to feel that way about it 10+ years.
If you haven’t used it in a while (1y+) don’t even bother with the 2.10.xx – I use Krita, GIMP, Inkscape – did some image editing in GIMP yesterday and it went good.
Since the latter 2.99.xx releases my position & criticisms have changed. New UX, Non-destructive Layer Filters and the workflow has improved the software a lot. There is a ton of activity on their gitlab.
Its still not perfect but easily beats Photoshop Wine at all basic operations.
https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/02/21/gimp-2-99-18-released/
And since this post is about Photoshop. Don’t pirate it. Be the change in the world you want to see. Let Adobe Rot in Pieces for decades of being anti Linux and anti FOSS despite popular demand and big Hollywood bucks.
Make them a relic of a long forgotten decade. The sooner we can move on the better.
I actually haven’t used Gimp for at least 2 years so I might try it again. My work gives me adobe CC so I use it there. I wouldn’t mind trying it again for personal.
I know adobe is the devil, but you simply can’t beat PS for UX and UI. Even their hot keying is far better than GIMP(back in the day, maybe).
Yeah I totally agree, I love Photoshop UX colors and general function. It’s been a while though.
On the other hand GIMP has a HUD command palette with hotkey
/and you can search for all image functions which is fine with me as I use my keeb a lot.And I did import PS hotkeys to go with my many years of memory and it helped me feel at home much better.
I have used many image editors over the years and I can at least say for basic functions, cropping, scaling, art it opens fast compared to wine and the pre 3.x UI is so much nicer to use.
I would definitely not recommend a cold switch for anyone at a job, the transition would be frustrating and problematic. But learning the “life raft” as a backup seems sensible.
It was a hard hit to my ego going from a PS God back to a peasant in terms of output, but I’d say the last few years the tooling has improved tremendously and I can say I’m a novice or mid tier photo editor in GIMP.
The text tool is nowhere as robust as PS, I felt like PS was a all in one printer one stop shop. But then there’s Inkscape so I am okay with dividing my functions up among a few tools instead of only 1.
I’ve designed concepts for houses in GIMP as weird as that may seem.
God do I hate 2.8 and 2.10 UX it was soo bad in terms of getting out of my way and an embarrassment at work, 2.99.xx thankfully is light years apart.
Edit: Also the GEGL non destructive fx stuff is really interesting and G’MIC Qt addon filters
I’ll def give it a try again. I manage website performance and run AB tests and have to chop my own images. So it’s not terribly demanding. So maybe it can help me transition
DaVinci is kind of broken on GNU/Linux, it has audio lags and is missing some codecs.
I wouldn’t say that Linux & Gimp are objectively better, but they sure are better in the long run, since you plop “gimp” into a nix configuration and never have to deal with installation and cracking.
For most use cases of Photoshop, GIMP is not an alternative at all. For more basic use cases it is, but st that point you shouldn’t be wasting efforts on Photoshop anyways, something like Paint.NET would be the recommended.
The closest we have for any Adobe alternatives are Affinity Photo for Photoshop, but that one is not free nor open source, but it’s a lifetime pay once license. For some use cases of Photoshop and Illustrator you could use Krita, which is FOSS, and for Premiere there’s DaVinci resolve, which has Linux builds and a free version.
For most use cases of Photoshop, GIMP is not an alternative at all.
Have you used GIMP seriously? And I don’t mean installing it, getting confused because the menu layout is different to Photoshop and giving up in disgust after 10 mins.
I will readily admit that Photoshop is currently more capable and faster in some cases but to say GIMP is not an alternative is ridiculous.
I’m not the person you replied to, I don’t use Photoshop, but I used to use GIMP exclusively and I use the Affinity suite now. What I’ve seen pop up in discussions about a major area where GIMP is lacking, going back several years at this point:
Photoshop supports nondestructive editing, and Affinity supports nondestructive RAW editing (and even outside RAW editing, it still supports things like filter layers). Heck, my understanding is Krita has support for nondestructive editing, too.
GIMP, on the other hand, has historically only had destructive editing. It looks like they finally added an initial implementation back in February. That’s great, and once GIMP 3.0 releases and that feature is fully supported, then GIMP will be a viable alternative for workflows that require it.
Yes, bring on 3.0! I checked out the development release and layer effects are working well. Happy days for us :)
Apparently there are some major colour upgrades coming in 3.0 too, so good news for printing.
Yes I have, but GIMP simply isn’t aimed at the same type of work Photoshop and AF Photo are. GIMP feels much more of a hobbyist tool to quickly make a simple edit and that’s done. And like the other comment said, it has no non-destructive editing at all, which is an enormous dealbreaker for any kind of professional work you might do.
but GIMP simply isn’t aimed at the same type of work Photoshop and AF Photo are
Look at the home page of GIMP’s website, where it says “Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done.” If it’s not aimed at the same things photoshop and affinity are then what is it aimed at? Music production? Video editing?
GIMP feels much more of a hobbyist tool to quickly make a simple edit and that’s done.
Why then are there so many transformation tools and filters and channel, selection and vector operations, icc profile management, scripting, etc etc etc? Just because you haven’t learnt how to do something in GIMP doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
And like the other comment said, it has no non-destructive editing at all
This point has been valid for a long time unfortunately, however GIMP does now have non-destructive editing. You can check it out in their development version.
I know you and me are not going to agree on this but I think it’s important to update and debunk misinformed statements, for the benefit of others.
I used to make graphic art in Paint.net myself, anyone who thinks photoshop has anything special is objectively wrong (we’re going to ignore generative AI tools)
The benefit of photoshop is that’s its more refined in what it does, not that it does anything extra that these foss tools can’t do.
The tooling has years of iteration by paid developers and there are a shitload of high quality presets and brushes and, again, refined use case specific stuff, but yeah GIMP is just as viable as a software to achieve most of what photoshop users online who shit talk it can do. The only people whose opinion even matters is professionals who require photoshop to make money for their bills. Everyone else is just blowing smoke out their ass about it because they think having a better tool automatically makes them better.
Just to note here, resolve is also much better than premier, even the free version. Considering the Adobe pricing, buying studio for $300 is a better decision imo.
kdenlive is solid for the simple cut/fade type of work.
I’d also add something I’ve mentioned elsewhere for pictures - in case of raws, paint.net is ok, but imo darktable+krita is a much better experience.
+1. Resolve is leaps and bounds ahead of Premiere and even After Effects when you consider Resolve has Fusion built in. I work on high level projects and often run into huge issues trying to work with Premiere projects. Most editors still use it simply because it was the first NLE they picked up. It lacks proper color management and its ability to export out to other software whether for post audio, color, or VFX is abysmal. I switched to Resolve about 5 years ago and while it isn’t without its faults, I’ll take it over Adobe bullshit any day. Sometimes I have to open editors premiere files to troubleshoot and I want to blow my brains out. Easily can wipe out an entire day just troubleshooting premiere projects. It’s funny because when I first got into the industry I was using Premiere and they were trying to push me to use Avid. I felt the same way about Avid as I currently feel about premiere.
Jsyk affinity started offering a 6 month no-cc-required free trial yesterday: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/trial/
Paint.net has to be the one piece of software I really miss from Windows, I still have Krita and Gimp but I used to use all 3 on Windows for different purposes
(Well that and VR, but ALVR recently updated to fix audio issues so that is at least coming along)
Affinity stuff also runs kinda on Linux
As far as I know it doesn’t, even with Wine/Proton. I mean, you can get it to run, but not properly and it’s very unstable, not usable at all so far.
I use Krita because I do hand drawn animation so I haven’t pirated photoshop since like . . 2008. Also use a tiltpen with it to paint tangent normals for bump mapping sometimes. Once I obtained good drawing tablets and stopped painting with my mouse I stopped caring about photoshop and its features
I wouldn’t even pirat Windows, there is 0 use in that shitshow, just use a Linux Distro of your choice. Oh and Photoshop vs Gimp (Gimp better imo) idk about after effects.
You’re right, broader compatibility and being more user-friendly serves no use to anyone
😂 User friendly windows… Tell that to your grandma when win 7 was around.
Oh and Linux is actually more compatible, you just need to work on it some times. Wich is great against cyber threats.
Just need to work on it, huh? Oddly, that something I almost never need to do with Windows unless I’m doing something extremely niche.
I’ve done more tinkering in windows than Linux over the time. Especially for older software. Also Windows breaks more often itself.
something extremely niche
Desktop Linux is already pretty niche.
You definitely aren’t wrong.
Thought you were talking about Linux at first.
I use both Windows, Linux, and macOS - my opinion is that Windows is the least user-friendly of the bunch.
Doesn’t sound like you’re using it right.
Is there a right way to use Windows?
Yes! Its called making a Linux bootstick and using it instead ;)
Ah, like using Edge to download Firefox!
Not whatever way you’ve been using it by the sounds of things.
Should I apologize for hurting your feelings by suggesting that Windows is bad?
It’d be pretty stupid to get any amount of upset over someone having an opinion. Factual inaccuracies are something else though.
Sounds like something an apple exec might say… For their products.
Nah. An Apple exec would outright tell you you’re using it wrong despite knowing of an inherent flaw in the design and offer to sell you a new one for even more money.
Guess this particular exec is not getting this month’s bonus.
Let’s be honest, he still would.
You don’t even have to pirate Windows. Without activation everything will work besides some customization (I think you could not change wallpaper) which you can easily bypass if you would really wish to.
I couldn’t switch to dark theme before it recognised my laptop’s activation key. I’m sorry to be petty, but I’m not going to sit here being flashbanged
Using a system where they won’t even let you change the wallpaper is some special form of perversion.
How can you pirate Photoshop and Elements? They are WebAssembly binaries that phone home before you are allowed to use them.
You pirate the last commercially available versions that you can download and install directly on your PC.
monkrus.ws idk how it works but it’s even easier than installing the legit way.
If one of the steps was leaking the source code then you could say that. Though who knows maybe AI reverse engineering will get good enough that we’ll soon be able to turn the assembly code back into C++ or C. Then you can port the software to whatever you like.
With assembly you’re very much limited to the hardware it targeted and without a huge amount of work the operating system that it targeted as well.
I’m disappointed it says “pirated” above the Adobe products instead of " M0nkrus"
This is my stance to people who have the Epic Games Launcher for the free games… Fuckin Black Flag is cleaner ethically than Epic Games