I just tried pdf craft on fdroid and really liked it, but its on beta and only 2 versions released.
Is it going to be well maintained and become an alternative or just stay unstable ai dlop? It had more stars on github than some other pdf viewers.
Whats your take on that. I am excited to see some decent apps on linux. Especially for .appimage and launching instantly unlike photoshop.
Believing these apps will succeed is based on an assumption along the lines of LLMs being able to produce quality code at 100x the speed of a competent human engineer. Maybe they can produce slop that fast, but using LLMs in a disciplined fashion to produce a quality product usually means LLMs are only providing a modest productivity boost in my experience.
It’s not realistic that these apps are anything but slop given the timeframe and scope spanning multiple complex apps that each took a decade or more to develop.
In my 20+ years of experience as a software engineer, I’ve never seen a successful project that hastily pumped out a massive pile of buggy code and then went back and fixed all of the problems later without doing a complete rewrite. You have to build incrementally and bake in quality every step of the way. LLMs may make the process a little faster, but the same rules still apply.
A poorly built codebase will always eventually collapse under its own weight. What I anticipate is that they’ll play whack-a-mole for a while and then give up. If they were targeting a small subset of one app’s features over a timeframe of months, I might believe it, but several massive apps all at once and it will all be done weeks from now? Stop bullshitting yourselves.
Things are different now. AI can do a rewrite / refactor all night and fix whatever issues were there. Also these are offline apps, so it’s not like they have to do migrations or care about uptime. I’ll wait and see how things go.
I’d sure like to see Adobe and their ilk get their comeuppance, so I won’t mind being wrong about this. We shall see.
I mean the majority of functions in the adobe suite are either not present or not working properly. It’s buggy nonfunctional slop and there’s frankly no world where it improves in a major way and stays supported long term
I mean I love that they are sticking it to Adobe but they are slop by nature. If it’s at least useful slop or if you should just use the actual open-source alternatives is debatable, I don’t have any talent with these programs anyway. I’d say learn the open-source alternatives but maybe try the artcraft stuff if you truly can’t do something in the open-source program, but that’s just my uneducated opinion.
I wouldn’t trust them to be long for the world, that and IMO they’re legally dubious.
Just use one of the established alternatives like GIMP/Krita, RawTherapee/Darktable, Inkscape, etc.
I’ve checked its girhub bedore and photocraft has a lot of contributors, over 400. But the apps are made mostly by claude code. Personally id never use these apps but so far theyvebeen receiving updates quickly with humans adding new bugfixes (humans or maybe more vibe coders…).
I installed the flatpak out of curiosity and these artxraft apps receive updates fast in my opinion, a d they add more things like a reverse engineer app or solidcraft thing.
in my opinion, even with human bugfixes and that, its still slop, I trust other foss alternatives.
I tried photocraft and it’s certainly usable. The video editor however wouldn’t play anything I added to the timeline at all. I also tried the MS word clone and it’s just janky-looking (like the text formatting seems to change if I click on the page? Hard to explain). I’d take pirated PS over it anyday though. One thing I can say is that photocraft is very fast to launch compared to Photoshop.
I’ve been using them happily, and they do what I need. So, to me, this is real useful software that’s replacing proprietary solutions.
100% slop
