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Adobe's Next Major Creative Cloud Release Won't Support Older OSes (petapixel.com)
nehumanuscrede writes: Adobe ruffled a lot of feathers when they decided to cease selling their standalone products and go subscription only. While a lot of folks complained, it doesn't seem to have had much (if any) of a negative impact on Adobe financially. Now, according to PetaPixel, Adobe is poised to cease support for older operating systems by depriving those users of upgrades and updates beyond the cut-off date, even though those users are paying customers (and have been for years). I'm curious if those impacted will upgrade to the more modern OS, or simply find an alternative to Adobe software (paid or otherwise).
Personally, I'm still rocking Windows 7 because, in my opinion, there isn't anything wrong with it. So, in the near future, it seems I'm going to have a choice to make: Drop my Creative Cloud subscription, upgrade to an OS I absolutely loathe like Windows 10, or continue paying full price for apps that will cease receiving updates (which was Adobe's whole argument for going with the subscription method in the first place so folks will always have the latest updated software). What are your thoughts? "Your Windows won't be supported if you haven't upgraded beyond the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (v1607) that was released to the public on August 2, 2016," reports PetaPixel. "And if you're on a Mac, you won't be supported if you haven't upgraded beyond Mac OS 10.11 (El Capitan), which was released on September 30, 2015."
Personally, I'm still rocking Windows 7 because, in my opinion, there isn't anything wrong with it. So, in the near future, it seems I'm going to have a choice to make: Drop my Creative Cloud subscription, upgrade to an OS I absolutely loathe like Windows 10, or continue paying full price for apps that will cease receiving updates (which was Adobe's whole argument for going with the subscription method in the first place so folks will always have the latest updated software). What are your thoughts? "Your Windows won't be supported if you haven't upgraded beyond the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (v1607) that was released to the public on August 2, 2016," reports PetaPixel. "And if you're on a Mac, you won't be supported if you haven't upgraded beyond Mac OS 10.11 (El Capitan), which was released on September 30, 2015."
According to reports on DPReview quoting Adobe, Adobe will still be supporting Windows 7 64 bit.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Windows 7 extended support ends in January 2020, less than 18 months away. Developing for one OS simplifies the code base and lets the dev take advantage of newer features - like how certain Adobe products can use Directx12 and render on both the dedicated and integrated GPU.
I would agree, but Photoshop is still without peer. I'd love to use something else, but there just isn't anything that I've found that's even close.
Software engineer / developer here. I can.
For software, it needs to be tested on (at the bare minimum) every OS it needs to run on. For rapid development like agile that means multiple tests running per day as builds occur. Each of these platforms could have bugs that occur only on that platform, and need to be patched without breaking all the other versions - which means more testing. Not all of this testing is automated (although the vast majority will be these days), but either way it's a use of time and resource.
Factor in that individual patch versions within an OS can cause problems, as well as other installed software packages, drivers and the like, and supporting OSs that are no longer considered current becomes more and more of a task.
It's less of an issue for free software (free in the money sense) because firstly there's no promise or contract that says it has to work on everyone's machines, and secondly because the userbase for said software tends to contribute bug reports and, for FOSS, fixes back to the code base. For a sold product like Photoshop, part of what you're paying for is absolute compatibility with your system. If that's starting to prove a major resource drain on Adobe, and it will be fairly substantial, then it makes sense that they're trying to cut our operating systems that are past their sell by date.
Depends what you're doing with it. Joe User, GIMP works just fine and dandy.
I've used both (Photoshop and GIMP) and GIMP doesn't even come close. Not even for Joe Non-Professional User.
It's quite an old OS, doesn't fully support newer hardware, doesn't get security support and updates...
Bullshit. Nice try, Microsoft shill.
Just installed Windows 7 on a computer yesterday. New computer with modern hardware, everything works just fine. Had to manually install a couple of drivers because Windows 7 doesn't *natively* support a couple of newer things, but that is trivial. Windows Update ran and updates everything. And it still gets security updates till 2020.
I used to always upgrade to the newest and latest as soon as it came out. Windows 8 and Windows 10 cured me of that. Utter garbage. And Microsoft shows no intention of acknowledging their massive fuckup. Instead they keep doubling down on the stupidity and making Windows worse and worse.
Once you whack it on the head with a sledgehammer and disable all the rubbish app stuff, Windy 10 is ok.
Add Classic Shell / Classic Start (new open source name)
Use Winaero Tweaker.
Use Disable Win Tracking.
Add Aero Glass for Windows 8 (if that is your thing, needs a donation for no nag).
Add old calculator.
Give paint 3d the heave ho.
Add the old windows picture viewer.
Add back all the old sound schemes (some guy on deviantart has done this).
And be prepared to do this each and every time you update as each update puts all the crapware back in.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I would whole heartedly agree...The Affinity products work both for mac and windows, and are one time purchase and not rental...they also are good about free updates and bug fixes.
You have to poke around the site to find the windows versions, tho...strangely.
Affinity Photo - This is the PS killer IMHO...it has every tool I've ever used on PS, and with the engine being written new from scratch I find it to often be FASTER that PS, and the content aware stuff is on par if not better at times that PS.
OH, and if you have an iPad Pro, I would highly recommend Affinity Photo for iPad, you have full blown desktop functionality on the iPad and it is amazing to work with.
They have a free trial on their products, give them a try.
Affinity Designer - This will give Adobe Illustrator a run for its money, I'm currently trying to learn vector stuff with AD.
Affinity Publisher - This is in public beta right now, looks VERY interesting.
On1 RAW - This is an up and coming alternative to Adobe Lightroom. I really like this, there is functionality that blows LR out of the water, I really like the luminance masks while working with your RAW images, there are tons of filters, and the latest versions of On1, now have pretty good cataloging and file management that was something I would have missed with LR. Its slightly more manual, but not a deal killer. I'm currently using it on an older MBP late 2011, 16GB ram, local SSD hard drive and external drives for cache and image storage, and performance is pretty good, although I find that at times it bogs while using my wacom tablet and pen, but if I switch to mouse, no problems. I'm hoping to soon update my medial computer and foresee these problems to disappear. This too has a free trial, I would recommend getting this, and looking through the tutorials and play with it...I believe this will be the LR killer...and I loved lightroom.
Now...for video and you want to get off of Adobe Premier....I like this:
Davinci Resolve - by Black Magic Design. This products started out as a high end color correction bit of software and it is still industry standard for that, but now, the NLE is very good, and is now paired with Fusion, an alternative to After Effects...and they're adding some high quality sound design/editing into it too.
You need to have a pretty beefy workstation to run this, but this is a quality one stop shop for most all things video.
There are several other options out there, I liked Adobe Products, but I just am not ready to "rent" my software and run into crap like this.
I've also been watching the Adobe products in the CC, and while there have been some improvements and updates that are kinda nice, I've not seen anything groundbreaking that would cause me to need to pay monthly/annually for my software, and I"d really get a bad taste in my mouth if I had to keep paying for software that isn't being updated or really supported.
I have my Adobe CS6 suite of tools for that category and I'm not paying regularly for that...one pay and done.
So...sure, there are a lot of people and shops out there with Adobe ingrained into their workflow and the muscle memory is strong there.
But there are now very viable alternatives...and in most cases, you can use almost all the same keyboard shortcuts (some come standard and some you can set up yourself custom)...and the layout of the desktop is very similar and familiar.
With others...well, if you know one, it isn't rocket surgery to pick up some new differences.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Software engineer / developer here. I can.
You provide a lot of what-ifs, but leave out the most important one: what if Adobe developers were at least remotely competent at cross-platform development, and created an actual API that they would code to. Implement that API once across each supported platform, then stop worrying about it. That's cross-platform development tutorial #1.
This isn't a "cross-platform development" issue, this is an "older operating systems are missing features that will help us make better software" issue.
In Adobe's case, OS X El Capitan is the first version to support Metal -- this API is much more efficient on systems with multiple CPU cores. Windows 10 is the first version to support DirectX 12, which opens op the capability of using multiple discrete GPUs for rendering tasks on Windows. There is no "cross-platform" or "backwards-compatible" way of doing these kinds of things -- all applications, including your mythical compatibility layer, will depend on the low-level graphics capabilities of the operating systems they use. It's completely unreasonable to expect Adobe to reimplement core OS features just to appease some technological refuseniks who prefer decade-old operating systems for aesthetic or emotional reasons.
And look, I get it, people don't like Windows 10 because they've bought into the hype that it's a "spying operating system". Yes, it sends a list of your installed apps to Microsoft, but they do that so you won't receive Windows Updates with known compatibility issues. And yes, it's measuring how long certain operations take, like opening the Settings app, but they do that so that Microsoft can prioritize performance improvements.
As for Apple, yes, macOS High Sierra has been the worst Mac OS release in over a decade, and macOS Mojave is shortening the leash on supported hardware range for Macs to 6-7 years, and it's removing features that people actually use like Back To My Mac... it's really super-frustrating.
But here's the thing: both operating systems also continue to add very useful programming APIs for developers so that they can continue to improve their software. The next update to Windows 10 is finally adding native Unix-style ptys, for instance, and the console natively supports xterm-256color. Mojave, for its part, is finally implementing the OpenType-SVG font standard, i.e. fonts with colour. Maybe these don't interest you, but there's literally thousands of low-level improvements like these over the last several years, many of which would make your computing life nicer.
But if you don't know about those things, and make personal computing choices based solely on press negativity, you'll never get to learn about, much less enjoy the upsides.