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by cosmic_cheese 9 days ago
IMO, Adobe suite peaked somewhere around CS1/CS2 (which ran happily on my single core 2Ghz iMac G5) and it’s been downhill ever since. A variant of CS2 that’d been feature frozen (aside from smaller technical improvements like wide gamut support) and ruthlessly optimized and bug-fixed up until present day would be vastly preferable to the trainwreck that is CC.
2 comments
-0_0- 9 days ago
As a kid with no cash but a lot of passion, I spent months cobbling together a fully working version of Photoshop 7 (pre-CS days) from various files extracted from free demo and upgrade installers. Technically did nothing illegal and ran that single version for a good 18 years across various PCs, eventually powering a large media company's output with it (in fact there's a very good chance anyone reading this will have seen some of my Photoshop work given the reach of that company).

The main reason I never upgraded was that it was FAST, and until Adobe started rolling out AI features around 2020 there were almost no notable additions made to Photoshop other than new versions seemingly getting slower and arguably uglier. To this day I'll still occasionally boot up the old Photoshop 7 if I don't need to use content-aware fill, and I'll marvel at how zippy it feels.

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cosmic_cheese 8 days ago
I spent a lot of time in a… not-quite-legitimate version of PS 7 too. Feels almost like a rite of passage for many of us of a certain age.

And yeah, 7 was quite efficient and zippy, basically just 6 with a few new features and compatibility with newer OSes (first version to run natively on OS X for example). Ran it on a 400Mhz G3 without issue, which would be futile to even attempt with modern versions.

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mghackerlady 8 days ago
I feel like a project to make an adobe CS competitor, limited in scope to those early versions like CS1 or 2, could really get off the ground. I suspect for 99% of users, things added since the CS1/CS2 days aren't really used enough that not having them becomes a dealbreaker
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cosmic_cheese 8 days ago
Fully agree.

I think this is true of a lot of software, really. Very few people need more out of their office suite than what’s available in MS Office 2000 for example, which is somewhat validated in the sheer popularity of GSuite (with e.g. Docs being little more than WordPad/TextEdit with collaboration bolted on).

In general I also think that fixed-feature projects are a woefully underexplored space in the FOSS scene, which is a shame because they’re structurally more sustainable than projects that endlessly add new features.

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