Adobe slept so incredibly hard on tools like Photoshop. They have been keeping that stack on life support for decades without any real innovation (Linux support?) and hostile dark patterns around subscriptions and cancellations. If we could peel the covers back and inspect the source I am sure it is as antiquated as a Pentium 3. They deserve to be supplanted by something else for languishing such a legendary tool. Even if it is vibe coded.
The crazy thing is, I’m not even opposed to paying a subscription for quality software that I get a lot of value out of, but increasingly Adobe CS is not that. For over a decade now they’ve been cramming in features for features’ sake with little regard to actual customer needs.
I would not hesitate to subscribe to a version of Adobe CS that is more or less feature-frozen at CS1/CS2, with all engineering effort and subscription money going towards bug fixes, optimization, adaptations for modern OSes and hardware, and code correctness. Can you imagine how insanely good Photoshop CS2 would be today if they’d spent all the time since its release working on those things instead of endlessly tacking on mostly useless gimmicks!? Its stability and performance would be a moat unto itself.
The first version I actually purchased was CS2! Over the years I have probably given Adobe like $3,000. For Photoshop. Joke is on me, honestly. I agree with you - I would gladly pay for good software. That is what surprises me so much about Adobe. They think their shit doesn't stink. They think they have it made. So they continue to drag ass on innovation, keep prices high, etc... If they released a Linux stack and kept their pricing sane, without hostile patterns around subscriptions -- they would continue their dominance for years to come. But that is certainly coming to an end when an enterprising individual can sit down with a stack of tokens and rebuild their software in a few days or weeks.
I still regularly use the Photoshop 7 I bought in Community College in the late 90s on my modern Windows 11 machine and in a VM on my Mac without issue. Its got 99% of what the newer version has for what I use it for.
As of today, just the Adobe Reader is 3.5GB on disk. So they're doing something, but I don't know what it is. A similar pdf reader app is around 300MB, and Foxit Reader is 950MB with more features.
Last time I installed photoshop the core application was relatively small, it's just that they cobbled on a few gigabytes of locally-stored tutorial material for... I don't know why.
