Subscription = addiction

Just like Microsoft office users, stop buying office and just download LibreOffice.

Firefox and Chrome both have PDF viewers built into them now, and that means Edge too... So there's no need even for Sumatra, Foxit, or really anything.

The problem is IT (me included) had installed Adobe Pro for years apart of the image no matter what.

Then licensing became more of a pain, and we don't really have a great way of telling if a user needs Pro or Reader.

Luckily with OS upgrades from 7 to 10 most of us fixed that and just made Reader available and Pro as a request.

Imagine using uwieldy Acrobat to read pdfs instead of Foxit or Sumatra or some shit.

Fuck that, Bluebeam is 900% better

I'm all for an individual person deciding to give MS and Adobe the bird and learning to adopt OSS. If that's what you want to do, feel free friendo and live your fucksubscriptions life.

But OP is posting a situation where a user is asking an IT admin for paid adobe acrobat and.....what, the user has no idea why they need it? That doesn't make any goddamn sense.

If reader gives them everything they need, then you briefly show them what they missed and move on. If there is something they need in paid to do their job, ya fucking pay for it because it's a goddamn $90 sub for a $60-80k employee. It pays for itself in time.

And everyone suggesting that an IT admin should force his users to use OSS have no idea how enterprise IT works. To do that, the business would need to retrain their employees and then handle all the incessant support requests that come in every day because they don't understand the software. Let's not also forget that new job postings would have to ask for familiarity with OSS, which could limit their incoming talent pool.

Plus, lets not forget the main reason businesses prefer to pay for software - support, or what I like to call the "someone to yell at" factor. These companies also tend to have full documentation and training videos that aren't made by volunteer 1st year students trying to get experience and YouTube influencers. So even if an employee has a training problem, IT can probably point to a support website instead of wasting hours on retraining.

And then the human factor. The employee you scoffed at will NEVER put the effort in to learn thw software becausd they now have a bias since you forced it on them. Which means you get to hear the bitching every time you respond to a support ticket. And every support ticket means lost productivity, which means lost money, which means any savings you earned are eaten away little by little, until your boss comes by and asks "what the fuck is wrong with you?"

I'm all for fucksubscriptions on an individual level. I love and use OSS software personally. But in a business environment, it just doesn't make as much financial sense as you think.

Is there anything acrobat does better than alternatives? I'm a blubeam man myself but that's probably industry specific. I guess it could have better form field organization and linking.