Like most folks in their mid- to late-20s, I’ve at some point used copies of Adobe’s software that was not necessarily purchased legitimately.  I know, I know, you’re shocked and dismayed.  Over the past year, I’ve made a point to do two things: get legitimate licenses to every piece of software on my system AND not have any Adobe shit installed on my system.  I’ve succeeded with the first, and have succeeded as much as possible with the second.

Let’s get this out of the way: Adobe’s software used to be pretty fucking cool.  And in some ways, it still is.  I have wet dreams about running Photoshop 3.0.5 on an 8-core Nehalem Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM filled with Velociraptor drives and Quadro cards because that would be the best photo editing setup EVER MADE.  PS3 was quite simply the best mix of features, size, speed, and stability of any version of Photoshop I can remember.  Since that point, it has only gotten worse.  And since that point, Adobe’s licensing bullshit has gotten astronomically worse.

I’ll say that I work in a direct customer-facing position where my job is to support my employer’s products.  Because of the nature of the job, and the customers, it has become incumbent on myself and my coworkers to support EVERY OTHER COMPANY’S PRODUCTS if is can so much as be imagined to interface with my employer’s products.  I have the utter joy of explaining to a customer why their $1500 Creative Suite 2 installation won’t work properly on an Intel Mac and why Adobe’s activation scheme, much like WGA, forces them to reactivate the software with a phone call whenever they pass gas.  This happens ALL THE TIME.

Lots of examples of Adobe’s bullshit can be had here, here, here, and especially here.

They have my ass in a corner when it comes to Flash.  I keep that shit updated because, as is evidenced by their Acrobat dev team’s skill, they can’t keep it together when it comes to zero-day arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.  However, since Flash is necessary to use most of the intartubes, I use the glorious free ClickToFlash plugin for Safari/WebKit. Coupled with Safari AdBlock (yeah, I know it’s funny since I have Google Adsense on this site anyways) my web browsing experience is much less likely to cause a seizure and only loads Adobe’s goddamned Flash plug-in when I want it to be loaded.

I currently use Pixelmator, VectorDesigner, ChocoFlop, Graphic Converter, Aperture, VueScan, and Raw Photo Processor to work with the various images in my day-to-day life.  And while that may give you readers pause, let me tell you, it’s absolutely great not having to think about what shit is going to go down on my system the next time I launch a CS program.  Coupled with the fact that it’s all legitimately purchased software, I feel like I’ve been liberated from the shackles of Adobe.  Much like Linux users are supposed to feel when they rid themselves of Microsoft, except I’m actually getting shit done on my operating system.

I’m no so naïve as to think that the world has no use for Adobe Creative Suite. I know that many folks would not be able to get their work done without the full fledged versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.  However, I’ll attest to being one happy motherfucker when I realize I don’t need their crap on my system any more. That, my friends, is a good feeling.