Makes sense! I hope it won’t get enshittified now that Canva bought them.

Thanks, glad to hear the alternatives work for her! Does she use FLOSS ones (Inkscape, Scribus, GIMP, Krita, etc.) or Affinity’s programs?

Thanks, that’s interesting to hear! Can I ask what sort of graphic design she does?

My work primarily involves CMYK publications made in InDesign, using graphics made in Illustrator and Photoshop. So inter-operability and compatibility with professional CMYK printing are key for my needs.

Honestly nah, there are lots of other good options.

Unfortunately as someone who uses Adobe programs for work, the FLOSS alternatives are just not there yet :/ (especially considering how seamlessly Adobe programs work together)

if you poke around graphic design as a hobby, these might be fine, but not for professional use from what I’ve read :/

e.g. apparently Inkscape still can’t really do CMYK

Yeah the problem with boycotts and “vote with your wallet” is that one whale can offset the boycott of thousands of low-spending players 😐

Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?

Consumer boycotts very very rarely work. I’ve never heard of a single successful video game boycott.

How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?

Lobby for appropriate legislation with your government representatives. We could have legislation that forces companies to transparently show the chance of specific rewards, and even show the money you have to spend on average to get XY specific item. (I think there is already a law like this in the works in the EU?)

One of the major psychological tricks gambling games (including lootbox and gacha) employ is to obscure the true costs behind premium currencies. Once they are forced to remove this, and you are shown that yes, guaranteed acquisition of a single Genshin character will cost you ~300 USD, it might make you do a double-take before you pull out your bank card. (There are many more psychological dark patterns these developers employ, so it wouldn’t be a single miracle solution, unless of course legislation altogether bans random chance rewards buyable with cash.)

No, all the current versions are reported various levels of broken :/ Generally they can’t install, so you have to copy an installation from Windows, then there are some that don’t load at all, some only load to splash screen, some do work after you patch their broken UI and manually copy some Windows DLL-s. So idk, you might get lucky with the specific program/version/feature combo you need, but it just sounds like a pain to me.

O&O Shutup10++ (theoretically works on 11 too)

Not sure what it can do on Home/Pro editions, I’ve only ever tried it on Enterprise.

I’ll upgrade to 11 Enterprise via massgrave.

Sadly with Adobe and some of my online games not supporting Linux, I have to stick with Windows :/ I’ll just try to disable all the telemetry and AI crap via O&O and group policies.