But I remember that you could keep the last version you subscribed to after subscription ended, which is way better (and the way Adobe products used to work).
I thought they let you use the version you used when you started subscribing, not then you ended the subscription? This was something a lot of people were upset about. That if you subscribe for a year and stop, you end up with a year old version.
Really difficult indeed, subscribed to the student sub a while ago, was cheap compared to normal prices for the whole suite. However getting out of the deal was forcing me to pay up the rest of the yearly subscription price, yo could get around this by downgrading the subscription to photoshop only and then it would let you cancel without any additional payments. Such a shitty dark pattern to do but it’s Adobe so it’s expected 🤷
And on top of that, latest versions of their tools are always free until the next release ( which is every 2-3 months ).
Their words when i talked to them on some convention.
Subscriptions are bad as hell, but jetbrains is doing them alright imo
So real answer time on subs from the Adobe side. Albeit not popular.
The real reason for subscription based licencing is push updates based on new tech with Adobe. Back in the day you had to wait for a new version of Premiere/Photoshop etc to support new camera codecs or new features like background proxy generation. This had to do with what's considered a new software package and software patent law with how you pay devs.
So you pay for features ABC for version 10. And pay for features ABCDE in version 11. But it you're paying a subscription service they can "live" update the produt to rollout ABCDEFGH constantly as they're ready to ship.
Yeah it's basically Adobe being cheap and not wanting to pay their devs better and for that I definitely agree fuck sub models. But for us professionals live updates in post is a godsend and also allowed our camera and production tech to upgrade at breakneck speeds.
At the end of the day Adobe is the best choice because the alternatives are mostly not software dev and UI focused. And they are on top of their game tech wise. So we're pretty much at their mercy on how they wanna charge us. I'm always excited to see what BMD is doing with DaVinci Resolve - the best pro color grading software out there btw. They've been pushing their NLE editing package of the software hard and is free, highly recommend. Would love to see them overtake Adobe like Adobe overtook Avid.
At the end of the day Adobe is the best choice because the alternatives are mostly not software dev and UI focused.
They're probably also the only professional game in town because they patent every single UX enhancement. And with IP laws favouring no one but the biggest cheese, they cripple their competition by calling dibs on sensible UX ideas.
You know that any software that requires a login or can update on its own can be bricked at a moment's notice if someone in legal or accounting changes their mind about the whole "perpetual" thing.
This is true, but compared to the prevailing alternative I'll take it. Unless there's a viable FOSS alternative for whatever software we're talking about at the time, of course. :P
Of course they are claiming oh no we won't be going subscription only, but if history is to be believed, give it a year or two and see that stance change.
Most Adobe tools don’t have any good free alternatives even for home use.
Yep. Lightroom is the one piece of software I tolerate paying a subscription for. Alternatives do exist, but they all suffer from the typical FOSS problem of never having had a designer look at them and help them build UI that's meant to be used by humans.
I've spent a bunch of time trying to learn Darktable, and at the end I still couldn't arrive to the same results I could in Lightroom by watching a 5 minutes tutorial and adjusting a few sliders. Not to mention that searching for a few of the issues I had led me to a bunch of threads of people complaining about the exact same issues only to be met by a developer telling them "if you don't like the UI use another tool".
Only use TeamCity professionally but the licence model is transparent and a doddle. No bloated loaders, wanky arbitrary rule or ridiculous gotchas, and the software is yours to keep (minus support) thereafter. They even recently released CVE mitigation patches for 2016 versions recently. I didn't resent paying them money at all.
Dotmemory, dotpeek, ryder, .. :)
I have yet to get my hands on any good memory profiler and il decompiler in vs/vscode that didnt suck.
Ilspy/dnspy for il stuff, dotmemory is my go to for profiling.
Source : im a .net/c# desktop developer