Can the recently released vibe coded Adobe Creative Studio clones work on old, underpowered Atom processors with a mere 2 gigs of RAM?
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s see if AI is actually good for something after all, and can bring useful software to awful computers.
If you’ve been keeping up with tech news, you may have heard of Art Craft. It’s a suite of creative and now office apps that popped up out of nowhere, and made headlines due to the manner of its birth.
To generalise a bit, essentially some AI Bro threw a bunch of tokens at Claude Code or something similar and told it to clone Adobe Photoshop, and it kinda has. There’s plenty of issues, and it’s still very much Alpha software, but this at least on the surface level isn’t far away from Photoshop.
But they didn’t stop there. They’ve made clones of Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, After Effects, Premier, Acrobat and Audition. So practically all the Adobe Creative Suite. And they didn’t stop there, with clones of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And they didn’t stop there, with clones of Figma and Autodesk’s AutoCAD thrown in for good measure.
I was curious so downloaded them, and, well, as I say, these are Alpha apps. I wouldn’t be running to swap business critical work over to them. I have to admit, however, they’re pretty good starting points. Art Craft are aiming for full parity in a matter of months, and it’ll be interesting to see if they can get there.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of these apps is how damn small they are, as in sub-100 meg installers, a tiny percentage of what the original apps have ballooned to. It’s not always the case that smaller apps necessarily run faster and more efficiently, but I figured it might be worth putting it to the test.
Enter this wee bastard, the PIPO X7, last seen being turned in to an internet radio station. It’s powered by a 12 year old 2 Watt, quad core Intel Atom Z3736F processor with base clocks of 1.33 GHz and boost clocks of 2.16 GHz, a mere 2GB of DDR3 RAM, and a tiny, slow 32GB eMMC drive. But the Art Craft website doesn’t list a minimum spec, so I guess it must run on anything, right? Even a processor that Passmark reckons is the 5,355th fastest in multithreading out of the 6,047 CPUs on their books, and something like a tenth as fast as Apple’s M4. I’m sure this is the power level the developers were envisioning when creating their apps. Or, well, getting a computer to create them for them.
This is still running AntiX Linux as used in our last adventure, which is ultimately Debian based, and these apps are supposed to run on Debian so I suppose there’s nothing stopping us giving them a surface level test. Seeing as the lack of the Adobe apps in particular are often an immediate blocker on people considering Linux, you can see why these apps have garnered interest.
The .deb installer packages are all available on GitHub, or you can download them from this launcher app is you so desire. They download and install fine, but a quirk of this stripped back AntiX system is that it didn’t come with the subsystems the apps are expecting to use to open file system dialog boxes, but that’s a quick command line fix.
Let’s kick their tyres a bit, and see if they can deal with some more complex files seeing as they’re marketed as complete open source replacements. Now, this whole “getting away from Adobe” thing is old news for me, as I saw the writing on the wall when Creative Cloud replaced Creative Suite and upped sticks then.
So, this is a bit of a twist from the usual takes on switching away from Adobe products, and instead switching from alternative products to imitations of Adobe ones. We live in interesting times. Also, there’s a few of these apps covering fields of endeavour I have yet to frolic in, so I might not be able to do much more than verify some of these apps open, but let’s give them a spin.
Let’s start off with the Adobe knockoffs first, and their Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft. It’s been a while since I last used Photoshop, having moved to Affinity Photo years ago.
The first test was simply loading up a blank canvas and running a few of the render filters, differential clouds and these flames. Even for low powered hardware this isn’t much of a challenge, I just remember it taking forever back in the 486 days and part of my brain refuses to give it up as a performance test.
Next up I’ve opened this nearly 50 megabyte sample poster file, and moved around a few elements, changed up the text, applied some filters, and so on, just basic stuff. I’m not going to pretend that it’s not quite laggy, and of course given that I have more powerful machines sat next to me I’d not choose this over them for this sort of work. And, well, let’s just take that as read for all of the apps we’ll look at today, so I’m not going to repeat that over and over.
Opening up this slightly smaller sample poster and again it’s doing pretty well with the basics. I though t I’d crashed it by switching to 32bits/channel mode but it pulled through eventually.
My needs at any rate are very modest, basically just the thumbnails for YouTube videos. So, for me, the most important bit of what used to be “machine learning” before everything got rebranded as Artificial Intelligence, when they really mean algorithm, is the tool to cut out items from the background, as seen in most of my thumbnails. This is normally not difficult to do by hand, the old fashioned way, but it can take a heck of a lot longer than the few seconds my PC takes to do it, and by this point quite reliably.
I couldn’t get quite as quick results out of Photocraft, with its object select tool seeming to always want to include a chunk of the background, However it did get close enough to make it fairly quick to finish the job manually, and the rest of my usual schtick is just duplicating layers to get the cutout, applying some text, and a few filters. Aside from me not being familiar with this interface, it seems that Photocraft can happily do what I need it do on the regular, and well within 2 gigs of RAM.
One last push with this 150 meg file, which did give a warning that a layer effect is not supported by this CPU, which of course there’s not much Photocraft can do about. This is getting closer to the RAM limits, but still within, so works as well as the smaller files. I expect if you are somehow working with files in the Gigabytes then that would be bad times, but Photocraft seems to be getting the most out of limited hardware. Quite impressive.
Moving on to LightCraft, which is a photo library and raw developer, thus a Lightroom knockoff. I’m an On1 Photo guy these days, landing on that eventually after Apple discontinued Aperture. I don’t think I’ve ever seriously used Lightroom for any length of time, but the basics I use work pretty similarly across all apps.
The first stumbling block is that it currently cannot load Olympus format RAWs, which the majority my photos are in. It did load my Panasonic files fine though, and I could batch convert the Olympus RAWs to DNG I suppose, but that inconvenience is enough to remove it from the table for me.
Pushing on with my Panasonic file, it did seem to be doing okay with the sort of light edits I typically do on my files, which is typically just tweaking the exposure, saturation and vibrance, followed maybe by a crop.
On some larger test files from other camera brands, these appear in the library fine but take quite some time to render changes. To its credit, it does get there in the end, even if it’s forced to use the swap memory on this slow eMMC storage. I did take long enough that I thought it might have crashed, so for sure this hardware’s not the most efficient way to process photos but it does appear to have all the elements I would need, at least on the basis of this brief check-in. If it gets Olympus file support down the line, it’s a contender.
SoundCraft is for audio recording, editing and mixing, so their Audition clone. I think I used Audition for editing podcasts over a decade ago, before eventually landing on Reaper. That sort of work isn’t too demanding, really, just deleting and moving audio tracks about, so as long as in can playback three or four tracks simultaneously without stuttering that’s fine.
The only real annoyance is that drag and drop doesn’t work, which is arguably sort of a AntiX Linux issue more than a Craft Apps issue, so I won’t hold it against them. However, importing audio individual track by track is laboriously boring.
I loaded up enough to at least get an idea of if this could handle the sort of basic editing a podcast needs, and performance wise it certainly seems to be fitting the bill. I’m unfamiliar with the tool controls and layout, but everything I need seems to be there and a great deal more besides. Memory usage seems to be well under control too.
I don’t have a massive, many tracked, many effect type of project file to give this a full studio style workout, but at least on these smaller projects this and the previous two Craft apps have been solid.
FilmCraft is their knock off of Adobe Premiere, and is the first app that’s really not too happy being squeezed on to this underpowered monster, so I can’t comment too much on this.
It seemed to be struggling a fair bit while playing through the 30 second ish sample project it came with, and exporting it looked like it was going to take about half an hour. However, it crashed quarter of the way through. By the looks of it we ran out of swap space, and that was enough to take the whole system down.
If you can’t get an end result out of the program, there’s not all that much point seeing if it can get to that point. As such I didn’t spend much more time playing with this, I’ll have to revisit with something a bit more powerful. However, poking around the menus does give the impression that this would have the chops needed to do the simple stuff like what you are watching now, but it can’t perform miracles with this hardware.
Moving on to their After Effects clone, EffectCraft which is intended to produce motion graphics and visual effects.
The effects part of my usual video tool DaVinci Resolve uses a completely different operating paradigm, and I’m not even very good with that. This is so foreign to me that I can’t do much more than load up the sample project and see how it goes. It’s not able to render it out in real time with this anaemic processor, but it’s not too far off it, so that’s impressive.
Again, fiddling with the menus reveals what seems to be a pretty complete range of effects so it appears to have a solid level of capability, and it’s doing pretty well in keeping the RAM usage down. Again, it’s just limited by the CPU. Exporting the mildly tweaked ten second sample animation does hit the swap file, but completes after 11 minutes, so we can at the very least say it’s functional on this low end hardware.
VectorCraft is used for vector illustrations ala Adobe Illustrator. I’m conceptually aware of how these apps work, from all the way back when it was the only practical way to have large images as there wasn’t the memory or disk space for huge bitmap files.
However, “aware of” and “competent at using” are most certainly not the same thing, as seen by this masterpiece of geometric shapes. Digging in to some sample files, this 500KB Illustrator native file appears to open correctly, missing font aside, and can be edited and messed around with while barely touching the CPU or RAM.
I also downloaded this 10MB test file, apparently identical to the 500KB version. I’m not quite sure how that works, but it’s being dealt with just as easily. I’ve not really used vector illustration at all so I can’t exactly confirm that this has all the tools needed for success, but it seems to have everything I’d expect and it apparently has a good amount of headroom to deal with more complex stuff. It’s the most responsive of the apps we’ve covered so far, and doesn’t feel compromised at all on low end hardware. Impressive stuff.
Next up is DesignCraft, the ersatz InDesign, used for desktop publishing and page layouts. This is another field I’ve not had any occasion to revisit since leaving school last millennium, so I’m leaning heavily on this inbuilt sample file.
It loads well, and making essentially random changes to the layout is being dealt with pretty easily even on the low end hardware. Like VectorCraft, it’s impressively responsive on objectively awful hardware.
I’ve tried a couple of InDesign files I fond kicking around the internet, and while I’m sure not having the font they use isn’t helping, there seems to be more serious structural issues with the layouts so at the moment at least, this app won’t be a drop in replacement.
Again, apologies, I’m not best placed to tell you if this is functionally equivalent to InDesign, but poking about the menus seems to reveal the required tools, and it’s also light on the RAM and CPU usage so if you do need this sort of thing DesignCraft is worth keeping tabs on.
PdfCraft is their Acrobat knock off, which is used to read, organize, combine, split and secure PDF files. I do use Acrobat in my day job, but mostly for converting Word files and signing them off.
I’ve loaded up a 10 megabyte sample file, and there seems to be no problem doing the basics of editing it. There appears to be an odd UI bug with the signature tool disappearing, but it’s working, and it’s quite remarkable how few bugs I’ve encountered in these early Alpha apps.
However, unless I’m missing something while this does have the ability to export a pdf to a Word file, with other formats promised in future releases, there doesn’t appear to be any way to turn Word files into PDFs. That’s a pretty major omission if we’re shooting for feature parity, so maybe this app needs a bit more time in the oven before we pass further judgement on it. On the plus side, even as a plain PDF reader, it’s quite efficient, so may be worthwhile for that alone
Before we leave the Adobe clones behind, I should note that Soundcraft, FilmCraft and EffectsCraft did not appear to be able to open the native files of the apps they are emulating at the current time.
Next up is FigCraft, their version of Figma, which I’m told is an interface design and product development platform. I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do with that information, so I’m not going to be able to tell you this does more than open without crashing.
One of the bigger sample files I could find online loads fine, barring the usual oddities cause by the font replacements, and so do the inbuilt template files. It seems a bit more RAM hungry than the other applications we’ve used so far but remains reasonably responsive.
I don’t know what’s important in this kind of app, so I won’t waste both of our time with further bumbling around. There is, of course, no barrier to entry for you to try it for yourself after all.
Moving on to WordCraft, which as you might expect is for Microsoft Word style word processing.
First impressions of this are good, and if you aren’t doing anything too demanding you might not notice the bits that aren’t implemented yet. It’s doing a pretty reasonable job of letting you smash text into it, and some more advanced features like the column layouts are working. It also seems to be handling images correctly, so if you just need to draft up your CV this will do the job fine, and takes up barely any system resources while doing so.
Give it a bit more of a poke any you’ll find some buttons that don’t appear to be hooked up to anything yet, like the thesaurus which doesn’t appear to be implemented, or the track changes functionality which appears to be working, but the button for the Reviewing Pane doesn’t do anything so you can’t accept or reject them. The bookmarking functionality doesn’t appear to work, and I’ll be damned if I could find a way to set something as a heading. Also, again unless I’m missing something there doesn’t seem to be a way to have two files open at once, which is odd, and seems to be the same across all the office apps.
I don’t mind this functionality not being present yet, it’s early software after all, but it’s annoying when it announces that they are there in the UI when they are not. Wordcraft is certainly a promising start, but it’s nowhere near ready for prime time yet.
Next up is GridCraft, for spreadsheets, so their Excel knockoff. A 19 megabyte install is ridiculous.
I used this a bit about a week ago to record the data for some benchmarks, so I know it’s capable of the very basics I think most households would use. Opening up this test file of the charting functionality seems to all be fine.
Poking around a bit more I did find a UI bug, with a popup that went off screen so I couldn’t dismiss it, and a similar thing happens when trying to set up a pivot table. The pivot table does appear to be otherwise working, but it’s not usable on my system in the present state.
It also won’t support VBA macros, so even if it does fix the above it’s not going to be usable for the many businesses I’ve worked at that build up essentially full bespoke applications for costing or sizing in macros with an Excel frontend, and I can’t see that ever being on the cards.
So, like Wordcraft, it’s really efficient for the basics that I expect almost all household use would need, but not exactly business ready at this early stage.
The last of the Microsoft clones is DeckCraft, used for presentations so it’s their PowerPoint alternative.
I’m essentially saying much the same thigs about this as with Word and Grid Craft, so I’ll keep this brief. I don’t have any particularly complex files on hand to throw at this, but it seems to be handling the basics pretty well. The slide transitions appear to be working correctly, and it’s behaving as I’d expect when doing basic editing.
A test of the animations in a sample from the web would seem to suggest it’s missing a few of them, although to be fair I’ve not checked this in PowerPoint to confirm. It feels like there’s less missing in DeckCraft compared to PowerPoint than in the other Office apps, and again, it’s very efficient in terms of RAM use for low end systems, but in this early version it’s not quite in a state a business would want to switch over to.
My general thoughts on the Office apps are that they’re not properly cooked yet, and LibreOffice remains a more obvious Microsoft replacement, with more reliable functionality and complete testing. It will be interesting to see how long that statement remains true for.
Last on the list, for now at least, is CADCraft for computer-aided design and drafting, so it’s taking on Autodesk’s AutoCAD. And, also, the only one on the list I can’t say much about other than it doesn’t launch properly on this dismal hardware, just giving a black screen. I imagine it needs more modern graphics capabilities to run. Always save the worst for last, as the saying doesn’t go.
Now, if you are unlucky enough to have sat through my previous tirades on AI, part of my distaste for it was the way multi-billion dollar industries hoovered up the work of writers, artists, programmers, hell, even just forum commentators to train their models without shame or recompense. Now, these apps are surely the ultimate expression of the chickens coming home to roost. But do two chickens make a right? No, wait, do two wrongs break an omelette. No, that’s not right. Are two clones in the hand worth a chicken in the bush. I think I’m having a stroke.
What I mean to say, I think, is that while it’s hard to feel sorry for the companies involved here given their documented history of manifold badnesses, from consumer hostile charging behaviours to anti-competitive practices, it’s not exactly sitting well with my sense of ethics and fair play to be okay with some goomba telling a computer to straight up copy their products, legally defensible or not.
At any rate, although often impressive, at the moment these apps aren’t complete enough to advise that anyone actually moves over to them full time, certainly not when most of these apps have more mature, established, non-vibe coded alternatives like the Affinity suite, Davinci Resolve, and LibreOffice. But if we believe Art Craft’s roadmap, it might only be months before we have to revisit that moral calculus, because certainly the economic argument is compelling, at £66 a month for Adobe Creative Cloud alone versus £0 a month. The pace its moving at is certainly impressive, in the week or so between me starting work on this video to writing the script FigCraft and CADCraft appeared out of the ether, alongside updates to the rest of the apps, and there may well be further additions to the suite by the time this is posted.
As for the premise of this video, by and large they are delivering the functionality of some of the most complex applications around on an impressively small resource footprint, so I suppose I am rooting for the Craft apps in that regard. If they can keep this up as they complete their works, it will keep older hardware relevant and useful for longer, and maybe that’s the moral argument that lets us use this and still sleep at night.
Maybe we’ll take a look at these again and re-evaluate them when they’re out of Alpha, but until then if you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.