> Well a few months ago I needed to fill out customs form 5106. This form uses some kind of proprietary Adobe PDF form creation software thing

PSA in case anyone doesn't know this: the built-in Preview app on MacOS can be used to fill in any PDF form. You can type into text boxes on some forms. But even if they're not there, you can add text anywhere on a pdf. You just have to drag your own text boxes to wherever you want to type. It also supports signatures and various shapes.

The options are sort of hidden - View -> "Show Annotation Toolbar" or Tools -> Annotate -> Text.

You shouldn't ever need adobe acrobat.

Yes, Adobe is bad.

The way I got around this problem was to:

1. Download a Windows 10 virtual machine. It's free.

2. Download Acrobat Pro 2020 Trial for Windows. It has a full installation kit.

3. Install the virtual machine. But don't give it an internet connection.

4. Copy the Acrobat kit to the virtual machine and install it.

5. Make a snapshot of the virtual machine. When the trial expires restore the virtual machine.

It will cost you 30GB of space and 1 hour or so, but Adobe will be contained at least.

I use Photoshop for art. Unfortunately, all other desktop software just isn't good, but thankfully Procreate is absolutely amazing software that I can use on my iPad (if you're reading this, devs, please port it to macOS. There are countless artists that'll pay to switch to a non-subscription based, non-Adobe piece of software that doesn't suck). But for desktop, I really have no choice but to buy into the Adobe scheme.

But yes, Creative Cloud is seriously completely fucking nuts. It's shit I do not and will not ever need or want for any reason and exists just to burn through my electric bill and contribute to climate change. Trying to find ways to disable it gives you cheeky employees who post marketing fluff about how it enables consumer whatever BS, but nobody can explain what those 8 dozen background tasks are doing or why we can't disable it.

I resorted to just deleting parts of the software package one by one. Most background tasks are gone. I made the mistake of updating one (1) time and the number of background tasks doubled. Absolute insanity. Nearly gigabytes of memory swallowed and CPU cycles wasted doing nothing. For all I know, it's nothing but crypto mining processes--and honestly, it probably is since Adobe has shown themselves to be money hungry and absolutely nobody can or will say what those processes are.

This is absolutely my experience of Adobe software too. Terribly engineered with priorities weighted for the board rather than users.

I’ve been a designer for +20 years and sans-Adobe for five, I absolutely recommend any young designers to avoid the Adobe workflow. You don’t need it.

Photoshop = Pixelmator (Kitura is also very good) Illustrator/Indesign = Affinity Designer

Highly precise vectors I draw in Glyphs/Fontlab.

Totally agree, Creative Cloud by now is really one of the worst pieces of software ever created.

Because we are on this topic - what is a great alternative to Photoshop that uses mostly similar concepts?

I’ve tried Affinity Photo but simply doing some photo cropping worked completely differently than PS and took me a long time to figure out.

My main use case is having a photo, doing a selection overlay and running „cut via copy“, then deleting the underlying layer, nothing too complicated :)

Yeah, Office got a lot better, but Adobe is still plain malware.

Here is one way to work around it:

- Create a new partition, install macOS and have each bootable partition have its own different FileVault password for encryption. - You can have a Adobe + other nononsencial software partition, and you can bail from typing your real partition encryption key, so your main data is secured from Adobe

I am not a security expert, but I did this for a while and it works well. It is annoying, but I felt my privacy was not at risk while I was booted on the "dirty partition".

Edit: I did it to use Premiere. PDF might be doable without that hassle as others pointed out.

It’s absolute cancer. My favorite part is the creative cloud app randomly taking up 4gb+ of ram doing literally nothing.

> I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it.

At this point I’m going to recommend a virtual machine.

This is really frustrating for me as well, I've been manually killing CC processes for so long that it became a usual task in my workflow, a daily habit. Adobe is one of the companies I hate soo much for this shady moves, and I'm stuck with its softwares involuntarily.

But decision is made, I'm upgrading to a new macbook pro soon and will change my design tools. At least I'll try hard before installing creative cloud.

>Once that laptop arrives I'm never touching Adobe software ever again unless there's a way to completely sandbox it.

If the ipad versions of illustrator and photoshop have the features you need that's the only way you can avoid all the nagware. I only need to do the occasional edit to a logo or photo so the ipad pro versions are enough and I prefer the pen to a mouse. I've stopped using them on desktop and use https://smallpdf.com for editing and signing pdfs.

I only install Adobe stuff on iOS. I can be reasonably sure they won't do shady stuff there. Their Acrobat PDF thing works on iOS as well as on Mac.

I'm thinking if, for these "one-off" tasks doable only with very special SW, we could utilize that APFS snapshoting feature of macOS filesystem.

1. Create snapshot 2. Install obtrusive SW, finish task 3. Restore snapshot.

Any sources for this kinds of workflow?

LibreOffice has Draw which can handle PDF files. It can edit and modify them and save them. The price is free https://www.libreoffice.org/

> two of them are NodeJS servers.

At least they're not Java Spring servers. That's the software I had to install to fill my tax form in my country.

I suggest you to use virtual machines for those kinds of tasks. That's what I'm doing.

I know this may seem extreme, but you could always run Adobe in a separate MacOS user login to keep it sandboxed. When you don’t need Adobe, just log that user out…

For natural media, Corel Painter, not getting much mention these days?