Examining Adobe's history of disdain towards Linux users

[securitybreach]

Linux users have recently been celebrating the arrival of an official Photoshop for Linux— yup, once Adobe’s Photoshop-streaming-via-Creative-Cloud is out of beta for Chrome, Linux users will be able to use Photoshop in an official way.

 

But Adobe hasn’t suddenly fallen in love with Linux. In fact, whatever support they provide for Linux seems purely coincidental. Adobe has been going out of their way to kill their consumer Linux software in the past few years: Reader, Flash, and AIR for Linux have all been axed.

 

Adobe Reader

 

Adobe Reader has never been the nicest PDF reader for Linux. It’s always been behind Windows and Mac. But Adobe did provide an official PDF reader for Linux. It was long stuck on version 9, while Windows and Mac are up to version 11. But as a reddit user noticed a few weeks ago, Adobe Reader for Linux is no longer available for download from Adobe’s website. This isn’t a surprise, as they’re no longer officially supporting Reader for Linux—it almost certainly has security vulnerabilities that will never be patched.

 

As a normal Linux user, you probably don’t care too much. Linux distributions include good, integrated PDF viewers like Evince for GNOME and Okular for KDE. Chrome and Firefox have their own PDF

viewers. Adobe Reader is clunky and not as nice to use, so you may have never used it.

 

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http://www.pcworld.c...inux-users.html

[Hedon James]

I have historically had disdain for Adobe products, so it sorta evens out. Native PDF viewers are much more featured, IMO, and much more responsive and integrated. And although not considered a TRUE replacement for Photoshop, the GIMP can do everything that I woulda used Photoshop for.

 

The only discontinued PDF viewer for Linux that I kinda missed was the Foxit Reader. It used to be available on the Foxit website as a DEB package and I had it installed on Ubuntu 9.10 when I first migrated to Linux. Even when I was a Windows user, I preferred Foxit to Adobe! I'll bet I have the DEB backed up in an old archive here, but not sure if it would work on newer 'Buntus. Besides, Evince & Okular are pretty awesome for me!

Edited October 15, 2014 by Hedon James