Relevent XKCD : https://xkcd.com/743/

I haven’t used Adobe’s suite since the late 1990s. I use GIMP.

However. I also don’t do graphic design work on a daily basis.

Adobe’s software packages are…I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I’m going to call them “expert software”. That is, they’re in large part designed for people who heavily use the software package day-in and day-out. “Expert software” is stuff that has deep feature sets that you spend a long time learning. Emacs is a great example in software engineering. Adobe Photoshop in graphic design. They often support some level of macro functionality, automation, add-on software, configurable interface, etc.

The thing is that all of the time that a user of one of these software packages spends building expertise also kind of locks them into the thing. Telling someone to “just use GIMP” instead of Photoshop…yeah, they have roughly-similar functionality, but there’s a lot of finely-honed workflow to break.

And those people have deadlines and stuff that they’re working under, and estimates based on their familiarity with throughput in the package that they know.

That doesn’t mean that someone can’t switch, or even that it’s a bad idea to do so. But…there’s gonna be friction for 'em. If you’ve spent 15 years optimizing your workflow, maybe it’s not starting from scratch, 15 years to do so on a similar software package. There’s overlap. But it’s not overnight, either.

I had a coworker who was design lead on a product. I remember how exasperated he got with some kind of very subtle placement behavior differences between GIMP and Photoshop, because he’d gotten very used to the Photoshop workflow that he’d built up.

Not open source, but pro grade, often nicer to work with than adobe stuff. The Affinity suite. Pay once per major revision. Decent upgrade plans. No subscription. Designer, photo and publisher.

Recently tried kdenlive because I had some trouble with premiere. It was surprisingly good. The problem is, DaVinci Resolve is much better than either premiere or kdenlive and while it’s not open source, it is free. And sadly I won’t be able to use either one for work because our projects need to be shareable among colleagues, in case someone else has to finish an edit for you, and premiere is the program everyone knows well.

Also, both gimp and krita, while being the best OS alternative for PS are still much worse. Especially gimp is overly complicated and user unfriendly.

Just to mention a not-foss, but extremely well done DAW, cheap ($60 personal use, $225 commercial) and goes through 2 major versions before you’d need to pay again, free to download and try WinRAR style, supported on windows, macos, and Linux, etc, etc - reaper.

https://www.reaper.fm/

If you need a solid DAW, with support for all kinds of plugins and a dev team that’s not a bag of dicks trying to screw you over with a cloud subscription and AI, this is it.