Pirating Adobe software is exactly what they want you to do. Their business model relies on businesses paying for their license because people already know how to use their software, in large part because people pirate it, and also they have deals with schools to teach their software.
What Adobe actually doesn't want you to do is to learn the software of their competition, since that's how they will lose money in the long term.
The main reason we need to push for open source alternatives is this. The more people learn how to use them the more content around them we get and more people take interest in using it and helping develop it (and donate to it).
I went to Affinity Photo and Illustrator years ago, and I’m a fan. One time purchase, easy to use, and full tutorials from the creators on Vimeo. Only downside is that it’s only available on Apple devices. Turns out it’s available on Windows now too.
I hear you. I used to use GIMP before I paid for PS. I bailed when Adobe went subscription, and figured I’d try Affinity for $10. It’s worth every penny. I’d get behind an open source alternative again if it met my needs.
I can understand it, I almost paid for Davinci Resolve Studio due to it still being the most complete video editor that works on Linux, most of the time closed source apps function better (specially due to the biggest funding), but still, using open source whenever you can basically prevents this from ever happening (specially after Canva bought Affinity, I'd keep an eye out for the eventual enshittification)
When you use the AI services in Photoshop, it tries to connect to their servers. But to crack Photoshop, you need to blacklist all those servers. If you try to, say, use the automatic background removal tool, Photoshop will give you a message saying that it will run the (worse) version locally because it can't connect.
Not that I'd know or anything. A friend of a friend told me. Basically a stranger. Don't even know his name.