How To Liberate Your Computer From Adobe's Chokehold
In 2020, I decided to not use Adobe products anymore, and I wanted to uninstall them with extreme prejudice. Now, mark my surprise when this was NOT as easy as uninstalling programs. Oh no, it is much more involved than this. It was an all day process for me, and while i still have some remnants I removed a great deal of bloat from my computer with this method. So, without further ado
How To Liberate Your Computer From Adobe
Phase One: The Uninstaller
Adobe programs are not easy to uninstall, you have to either do it from the adobe creative cloud desktop app (which requires an active subscription to log into and use) or use a software specifically for removing adobe products. You must also use this software to remove the adobe creative cloud desktop app itself. It took me far too long to find a download for this software. Here is a page with the download link for it.
Once you have downloaded the zip file for the uninstaller you will:
Unzip the file and extract it to your desktop
Confirm that you want to uninstall the creative cloud desktop app
I believe there are also options to uninstall every installed creative cloud suite application such as Photoshop or Illustrator as well
Once it has uninstalled the programs, click “Close”
You can then delete the uninstaller executable from your computer
Now, that covers the surface of things. Now you must initiate
Phase Two: The Surface Clean
Adobe loves to hide lots of little programs in your computer, and this can use massive amounts of storage space. Luckily, with a little care you can wipe them out by following these steps:
Right Click the Adobe Folder, then Delete it
It might ask you for administrator access, if you are the administrator just delete as administrator (click the delete button with the coat of arms next to it) or get whoever the administrator is to give permission to do so by entering their password
You will then repeat this process with Program Files (x86)
Go to Program Files (x86)
Right Click the Adobe Folder, then Delete it
It might ask you for administrator access, if you are the administrator just delete as administrator (click the delete button with the coat of arms next to it) or get whoever the administrator is to give permission to do so by entering their password
This concludes the surface clean. You must now initiate
Phase Three: The Deep Clean
There are just a few more things you have to do to banish adobe from your machine as much as possible. We’ll cover that process in this section
The first thing you need is to be able to access hidden folders on your machine to do so follow these steps:
In the Upper Left of the File Explorer Window Select View
Select Change folder and search options.
Open the Advanced settings
select Show hidden files, folders, and drives
You can now close out of the “Folder Options” Window
If you want to do the next step right away, keep File Explorer open!
Now that you’ve done that, we can move on to the next and final set of instructions!
Delete everything inside the adobe folder except the folder named “Adobe PDF”
You’ve now completed the most thorough removal of Adobe i’ve figured out so far! This clears up a significant amount of storage space and your computer may even run faster now! I’ll answer a few questions you might have now!
Q: Why can’t I just delete the Adobe Folder in ProgramData ?
A: I’m not sure why, but I know that it won’t let you delete the folder itself, even with administrator permission. I think this may be because it houses Adobe PDF, which is Windows’s PDF viewer (I’m not sure what deleting the things inside this folder would do, I’m hoping to test that and find out. If you can safely delete these folders, I will update the tutorial to tell you. For now, I wouldn’t recommend experimenting in case it breaks your machine)
Q: Why are there so many steps?
A: Adobe is a company with a massive monopoly, so it can afford to install all this bloatware on the user's machine without worry of protest. If there’s no alternative, people have no choice but to accept these background programs. Luckily, other people have compiled lists of alternatives so you DO have a choice.
Also, I tried to make this tutorial as accessible as possible to people like me without a great understanding of computers. Researching this there were a lot of tutorials that were not super accessible if you didn't already have an understanding of computers. I wanted to change that.
Q: What if I missed something?
A: well, it doesn't hurt to check task manager occasionally and scrub through any background tasks. I do that occasionally and for a week or so when i would open it up there would be something with Adobe in the name running. I would google the program to make sure it wasn’t important to the computer’s functioning (just so you know, it never was) and then uninstall it through task manager. After about a week I think I got everything because now I never see anything Adobe running.
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