it’s pretty widely known that its a toxic hellscape there, i’ve typically had great interactions with users in dm’s but the chatrooms have become overrun with toxicity and fascists over the past decade, it’s absolutely not representative of the online music community which is largely left leaning, even on p2p and piracy platforms

for me the biggest hurdle was getting used to the ui, adobe is definitely the best with ease of use and layout, but so far ive found the feature set to be solid for photo editing and quick gfx work, i definitely miss camera raw and some of the non destructive editing features but gimp has gotten a lot better over the last couple years, especially on the current beta as theyre getting close to the 3.0 launch. definitely not the best choice for everyone but i think it has its niche

im skeptical with the amount of people on the original forum and github saying the cracker had bundled malware with it at some point

i used to run an older version of cc (i think it was cc2018 where u just had to swap a dll to make it think u had an infinite trial) and then recently i’ve switched to gimp and inkscape and haven’t looked back.

i’d honestly recommend foss alternatives for anyone who does gfx and photo stuff as a hobby over the adobe cc just for how much quicker and relatively stable they are

your best bet is probably just seeing if u have any friends with an account that can rip them for you or share the login with you

hey they dont pirate shit but they sure do have a lot to say in the comments lmao

pdf drm is already really easy to defeat (there’s online file converters that can do it in seconds), i agree on the rest tho i probably wouldn’t use it personally, libgen is great for anything academic and then for the rest, slsk has a surprising amount of books floating around