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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Ah, that's good to know. I wonder why that is. I don't use these programs beyond the odd very simple image manipulation that could be done just as easily in paint, so I have no idea what people want from Photoshop alternative. However, I seem to keep hearing no single open source program does everything from people who are PS power users.
Don't get me started on AutoCAD, and just CAD tools in general... Being more involved on that side, from a dev rather than user perspective, I can't say I think very highly of Autodesk, or the idea of having all these geometry kernels be proprietary, and Autodesk acquiring as many of them as it can. Maths is public, maths research belongs to the public, you can fuck off with gating it.
As for VMs, we are talking about apps that need a relatively good GPU and therefore one would need to do some GPU pass through on their VM to use it properly I believe. Assuming I'm right, that may be more trouble than it's worth compared to a dual boot (also assuming this hasn't gotten much simpler than my somewhat distant memory now)
Modern versions of Photoshop are deeply integrated with another software called Adobe Cloud. As in, you can't even install Photoshop by itself, it needs to be installed and managed via Adobe cloud, which has to constantly be running in the background for Photoshop to work (and it wouldn't surprise me if it's some kernel level BS, knowing Adobe). They are also reliant on other Adobe online services for some tools and services, and not just the generative AI ones.
That's usually what causes a lot of hangups I believe. For example, if you need to connect your Photoshop to your client's Adobe cloud or share files through it, or maybe connect Photoshop to other Adobe products like Indesign or After Effects, that may not work properly. This even applies to pirated versions of Photoshops on windows, where a lot of the patching comes from blocking Adobe's constant interference with the program as it's running, but as a result several tools may end up not working.
As for stuff people want from Photoshop, this is anecdotal from me but I primary use Photoshop to letter things and literally no other program that runs on Linux even comes close to the simplicity and versatility Photoshop gives me for lettering with its type tool. It is just so simple to configure text the way I want to and there are so many ways to modify it. Clip Studio Paint is the second best contender (makes sense since it used to be primarily a comic creation software) but, shocker, it doesn't run on Linux either.
Every open source tool I tried, Gimp and Krita included, is so many miles behind in this department that I thought I had returned to the stone age when I tried using them for this purpose earlier this year. Krita didn't even have a live preview of the text I was writing. It was completely unusable for my more advanced needs.
This is why I just tell people who use Photoshop and Adobe that want to switch to Linux to just accept dual booting. It's realistically the only thing that won't constantly lead to headaches with the software.
I have to use illustrator for work sometimes. I used to dual boot, now I use winboat. It's a bit of a pain to set up initially but it works well once you've done that
Thank you so much for the detailed answer. I was not aware of that level of BS on the Photoshop front, though that does not surprise me. I guess I'm showing my age a bit by remembering Photoshop to just be a standalone program without any of that "not that long ago".