Not everyone uses Electron apps exclusively.
The cross platform scene is much different these days. Electron apps suck, but at least they suck equally across all platforms. And there are many Electron apps.
But a lot of people rely on Adobe, Microsoft or Windows-only, Mac-only apps. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
Breaking free is easier than ever. You don't need walled gardens.
AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial. Any workflow, custom spreadsheet, specific OS-only app can be worked around, easily. Staying stuck on Apple or Microsoft is a choice - they're no longer returning value concurrent with the money they charge.
You're free to continue giving them money, but the reasons to do so make less and less sense each day that goes by.
I use Adobe Illustrator daily at a very high level and have about 25y of source files in its private format, as well as a bunch of plugins I rely on. How well can Linux deal with running a version of it written in this decade?
Inkscape is not an option, nor is anything involving importing PDF/SVG, those have to expand a huge ton of stuff that's represented much more compactly in an .AI file. It's about as large a difference as that between an executable file and its source code.
I don't think there is an answer. The best you can do is probably running Windows in a VM and limiting its use to applications that you really cannot replace. It's been a while since I used a VM on Linux, but VMware had a thing called Unity Mode where you can have application windows from the VM on your Linux desktop:
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/desktop-hyper...
It seems like they removed it from VMware 17.6, but maybe another VMM still has this functionality?
I haven't tried it but I've seen this project promoted in some tweets and maybe even here: https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
https://www.vectorpea.com/ and https://www.photopea.com/ are the lowest barrier to useable alternatives. You can even save them offline and convert to PWA, with very little friction. vectorpea and photopea should handle your .ai files admirably.
Inkscape, Affinity, other open source alternatives exist, but have a remarkably different UI and don't capitalize on your muscle memory.
The feature overlap is bordering on complete, but there are some Adobe Illustrator only perks, for sure. Most of it you can make up for with any of the frontier image AI models.
There are plugins - if you're well versed in how they work, converting between AI and vectorpea should also be a piece of cake with AI.
> Breaking free is easier than ever. You don't need walled gardens.
There’s nothing that comes even close to Photoshop. Same for a lot of similar professional tools.
> AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial
Not for anything remotely complex. Let’s see how that looks in 5 years, but I’m skeptical.
Photopea.com exceeds CS6 but keeps the UI. All sorts of plugins, great project. You can also use various hacks like photoshop UI for Gimp and things like that, but I found that route to be unusable.
I've converted over a dozen weird edge cases of spreadsheets and access apps and ancient scripts used by departments into standalone little apps or browser apps, ranging from budget and finance related bookkeeping to tracking sales to licensing management. The only advantage Excel has over this is ease of maintenance - it's a lot easier for someone to guide themselves through updating things on a spreadsheet, or to break an idea down into multiple pages, etc, if spreadsheets are what they're familiar with.
If you're an engineering or finance firm dependent on an obscure, unique Excel feature, I could at least see the argument that your use case is too hard to migrate off of Windows.
Photopea is a really impressive project, don't mean to diminish it in the slightest, but it's a toy next to Photoshop.
> exceeds CS6
I wish. It's not even on par with Photoshop 4. No LAB mode, handles only 4 profiles. I could be here all day listing missing features. Also, have you tried to open a 6GB PSB file with it?
I've used Photoshop almost daily since 1994. I really wish there was an open source competitor. There isn't.
"Adobe Creative Suite not running on Linux can be worked around easily" is something that people have been getting wrong for decades, but injecting AI into the premise is a new frontier of funny.
What's the AI workaround for Illustrator/After Effects/etc.? You're not suggesting generating vector art or video assets via LLM replaces these, surely?
I'm very curious what their workaround plan for something like U&I MetaSynth would be.
Given than Adobe has their own GenAI trained on work licensed for that purpose in Photoshop, I think they would disagree with you on that.
Offering to add it to the workflow doesn't mean they think it can replace the whole product for all users - if they stop shipping the rest of the features, then that'd be Adobe "disagreeing with me on that".