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Adobe Sucks

Allison on 2004-07-20T23:18:28

[Fair warning, if the title didn't give it away: I'm a bit grumpy.]

I just purchased the "all the bells and whistles" Adobe Creative Suite Premium for MacOSX. After two weeks of talking to tech support with installer problems, they finally say the Creative Suite installer and applications won't run if the system is booted off a UFS partition (even if you install onto an HFS+ partition).

They could've saved everybody a good bit of time if they'd bothered to mention this in the system requirements. I even scoured google before I bought it, looking for any mention of problems with UFS. Nothing. [later note: A recent search reveals that a friend has been here before me, though long enough ago that they really should have fixed it by now.]

Really, if your high-level GUI application (not system tools) depends on a particular file system running under the OS, you're doing something wrong. This is why we have layers of abstraction. At the very least, the installer should detect that you're trying to install booted off a UFS partition and give you a sensible error message instead of rejecting the serial number. And the tech support people should know it's a problem, so if a customer asks "Could this be a problem with installing on UFS?" they don't reply "What's UFS?". (And no, I won't consider going back to HFS+. I've been admin-ing Macs since the bad-old HFS days (pre-"+"). Any file system that loses data if you don't run third-party utilities on it every month isn't reliable enough. I don't care if they added journaling. A band-aid will not fix an amputation.)

Oh well, at least they were nice about letting me return the software.

It'll be highly ironic if my need for image editing tools (upgrading from a 6-year-old copy of Photoshop/Illustrator) is what finally drives me *away* from MacOS. :)

UFS vs. HFS

pudge on 2004-07-22T22:45:45

I won't try to convince you to use HFS+, but I just want to note that everyone I know who uses it, regrets it.

Some other notes: you can now have case-sensitive HFS+ partitions, and Tiger's command-line tools (cp ... maybe even tar? I forget) are supposed to work properly under HFS+.

I do agree with your main point for the most part, but I believe this is primarily Apple's fault, as they do not do much to help developers with UFS problems, and with these moves to make HFS+ better for us geeks, it seems they might not be planning on fixing that any time soon. But who knows, maybe next year when Tiger comes out, you'll find it sufficient enough to your needs that you'll switch to it. :-)

Not just the CS

darobin on 2004-07-25T19:41:35

It's a problem that seems to plague all Adobe software, even the SVG Viewer, which is just a simple plugin, won't run properly if you boot into UFS. I have no idea where exactly their problem comes from, but it's quite thoroughly broken.

It shouldn't be impossible to lobby them into fixing that accross the board of their software. All it takes is a little bad PR. Do you think we could get organized to make that happen? So far I've kept to complaining in SVG groups, but I can take it elsewhere :)