Reply to post: Acrobat for windows is the devil.

Acrobat for windows is the devil.

It's tangled up in the whole Creative Cloud BS. It installs itself like a rootkit. It's uninstallers don't work. The dedicated uninstall tool from tech supprt leaves two browser plugins behind, files in 7-8 directories, some of which are named as random GUIDs, and sprays stuff all over the registry for _each_user_ meaning if you do a deep clean under a local admin account, it's still borked when a user logs in.

Adobe has started saying that none of the current supported versions of CC are installable in any virtual environment. It's "DRM" system is like cancer. If you disable it system killing auto runs or it's malware plugins, it re-installs them after every launch. For extra bonus fun, you have to create a CC account and log in to update basic settings on the local installation. And their installers can't usually be deployed from a package management tool on either the mac or windows, so you either let your users install random apps and updates that haven't been tested or put under change management, or you have to manually patch each system.

As a bonus, adobe will steal your users information, and target them with misleading ads prompting to create a pay for a personal subscription to CC even when the install if from a company site license, and is already paid for, and will point them at a CC install that can hose the OS so badly that you will need to wipe the machine to get Acrobat working again. And their support will deliberately route you to a tech on a shift for the middle of the night if you request a daytime contact, or the middle of the day if you request after hours.

Your IT department probably has good reasons if they hate Adobe and Acrobat. They may not be the same reasons others hate it, but they aren't wrong.

And while I wish I could walk into my bosses office and hand him a BSD desktop, I'd get fired by the end of the year, like 85% of the people that try to force an entire office to migrate to a non-tradtional os. Users get bolshy moving between Macs and PCs.