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Let me bore you with some stories:

Woman whom I met while being at uni one day calls me and asks for help with installing Photoshop - I ask her why she's doing that. She never was into graphics software and in fact, constantly needed my help with the true computer basics. She said she went to this photography course and the instructor guy ordered everyone to get Photoshop to fine-tune their work. I told her she should be careful because it's likely she'll be maneuvered into a subscription for a piece of software she doesn't need. I also mention Gimp but she refused as they were working with Adobe software only. Fast-forward to a year later: she unsurprisingly cancelled Photoshop sub. Prob with a help of her daughter boyfriend who become the personal tech support guy for the whole family.

There was also a case of finding her a replacement for trial Office she got with her machine with - she was familiar with Word for years. So I suggested OpenOffice and it worked pretty well up until some document formatting issues happen, which were resolved already in LibreOffice. I installed LO but she found its UI hard to use somehow, and in few weeks she opted to redo her papers with some cracked version of Office.

On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if that photography course would be all about getting people trapped within Adobe software and the instructor would be paid for each head he managed to catch.

Then there's my closest friend: for years she was working with pirated Photoshop 7 up until it refused to work on her Win11 machine recently and she had to swap to a yet another pirated CS version. Same goes for managing photos and her drawings pieces - it's always ACDSee 2.xx with the commonly-known-serial-number. I suggested her Affinity giving the example of the woman from my original comment, but she said Photoshop was and is always enough for her and she wouldn't want to learn everything all over again in another UI. Tho, she's enjoying darktable and rawtherapee along with Stellarium for her sky-watching which I suggested her.

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While two examples may be that much, I do believe being committed to familiarizing itself with software in early stages makes the switch harder later.

I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments... That'd be really interesting stuff to read.



> I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments

I learned 3d modeling in 3ds Max as a kid, but many years and a CS degree later, I ended up switching to Blender because the license cost of 3ds Max was absolutely mental for a hobbyist ($3,000ish?). This was after the Blender renaissance where they overhauled their UI and stuff. But it wasn't my first time trying to switch to Blender from 3ds Max. In terms of features and workflow, both are very similar (and I actually like some things in Blender more), but it's the little differences that end up bugging you in my experience. Like some alt-mode of a feature being missing. Or the camera handling differently from how you're used to.

I'm currently going through this again now, switching from Unity to Stride game engine. At a quick glance, they're extremely similar, but that's almost worse. It's like coming home to your house and finding that it was replaced with an identical house.




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