*+ I am peed off with Adobe/Apple for never really sorting out a glitch in Photoshop CS6 see: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussio...
I am thinking of going back to Windows. I have a legit copy of Photoshop CS5 that still runs under windows 10 fine and to be honest I think Microsoft for all their sins are better at enabling you to use your old software that you have actually paid for on there new OS’s than Apple. I would probably buy a new Mac-mini if I could still use CS6 on it, but alas I am too peed off with Adobe/Apple right now.
I am thinking of shelling out on a New PC Rig instead and bighting the bullet and learning Affinity Photo and Design instead for the long term. I think this is goodbye OSX (pretty as you are) and Hello to Windows 10 dual booted with Manjaro -for giggles…
Does anyone have any other suggestions? I haven’t used GIMP for a while but last time I used it I didn’t get on with it (maybe I am a bit thick). I liked Krita a lot but it seemed a bit buggy- not complaining its free.
I am only designing like Youtube Thumbnails and the Odd poster doing a bit of WebDev HTML/CSS and that sort of thing.. I don’t work in the design industry or anything.
Note that the Affinity apps are feature rich and produce professional results, but they are not designed to mimic all the tools in Adobe apps i.e. Affinity apps are not feature-equal to Adobe (by design).
If you are designing YouTube thumbnails or posters, then the Affinity apps will be more than capable.
There are also a fairly large number of tutorials on the Affinity apps, particularly on YouTube. And if you ever get stuck trying to achieve something in Affinity Photo, there's enough overlap between Photo and Photoshop that you can usually follow a Photoshop tutorial and recreate it in Photo.
The Affinity website has a showcase of work made in their apps: https://affinityspotlight.com/
If Affinity feels like overkill for you needs, an online template service like canva.com might be worth a look. Canva have ready-designed templates you can modify (including posters and YouTube thumbnails). They have a free tier and paid subscription tier.
Also, I'm not a graphic design guy. But when I need layers of pixels and brushes and the rest of what I consider required tools, Krita is my tool of choice. Kind of like Blender for 3D, although we also use that for 2D now since the newest upgrades have gone through.
If I had to do this as a job there isn't much doubt that I'd be on a work provided Adobe subscription like many others suffer through.
Personally I try to focus on software that has the largest variety of supported ecosystems. (ie. Gimp and Blender support Win x86 and Mac/Linux x86 & arm64) I don't like using tools that I have to throw away just because I'm on a Pinebook Pro for the weekend experimenting with low powered ARM nonsense. Although blender support is janky on many ARM devices depending on your level of OpenGL support, thinks are improving gradually.
For me it makes a lot of sense to try and be as hardware/software platform agnostic as possible with my software choices. It's massively helpful that I make music with a DAW called Renoise because it's the same program whether I'm on Linux/Windows/MacOS outside of what they use for the audio backend in each OS.
In the end there is nothing wrong with just building an intel/amd powered desktop and installing Win10 or some sort of mainstream linux solution for the sake of your time and sanity. Although keep in mind Win10 is less than 5 years away from EOL.
I'm looking for a new vendor too. I would love to cancel my company's CC subscriptions. The problem is we're meshed into the Adobe ecosystem to a certain extent, in particular editable AI/PDF files are still the only real option for getting graphics with movable type to printers who need to do on-the-fly modifications before going to press (so our studio isn't swamped with "please change the date on this ad and send us a new outlined version").
However, it's become clear that Adobe is now leveraging its monopoly to sit back and charge monthly while breaking, abandoning, and failing to fix software that worked for years.
The biggest downside is it’s macOS only.
I've been a super loyal Adobe fan for a long time. I would probably have kept using PS forever if they had just literally stopped developing it, but between moving familiar feature (randomly changing how scale-preserve aspect works??) and breaking everything (zoom and navigator is just super flaky nowdays, the text tool is completely bonkers lately). Some of the stuff they added is useful, the embedding "smart layers" was helpful for a few things but caused me some headaches too, but I don't really care to relearn everything.
They're really bad at the "We made this better" thing, for example, the new brush tools are certainly better and i guess a big improvement, but was doing a lot of digital painting years ago and now just use it occasionally and I don't know how to use them, and all the old skills I had are gone. I'm sure I would agree that almost every change would be better if I had the time and motivation to relearn them but, if I have to take the time to relearn something I'm just going to relearn the hot new thing (like Procreate) instead.
As a Mac user I prefer Acorn though, since its GUI feels more native.