of course a variety of free alternatives
Not to Adobe photoshop. I bought Paint Shop Pro7. There are other newer packages for advanced photo editing that are OK, but none free. Simple Crop / Resize / Gamma etc, yes, plenty of free stuff.
People (even companies) may buy software and less and less frequently update, because frankly newer versions often WORSE (PSP 10 vs PSP7, MS Office with Ribbon compare to Office 97, 2002/XP or 2003).
Maybe 20 years ago you had to upgrade every year, and 15 years ago every other year. Not any longer. OS X, Linux, Windows, MS Office etc long ago stopped getting more productive in any significant sense. If MS released a single "Professional" classic Edition, with all the best of NT4, W2K and XP, that would really sell. All this fake differentiation of versions, trying to make desktop/laptop compatible with tablets and phones, monkeying around with were stuff lives, windows 2.0 style artwork, data slurping etc is absolute insanity. They have lost sight of WHY 14 years later over 25% of PCs still run XP and why people prefer Office 2002/2003 etc.
They lost the plot sometime around 2003/ 2004. The Ribbon, Vista, Win 8.x (Win7 should have been free to Vista users it's only a fix up of Vista), Win 10, Subscription, Data slurping, One API/GUI for everything is all madness. Modern UI / Metro is based on Zune. It's a fine idea for a phone or small tablet. Larger tablets need a different GUI as do Laptop/Desktops. Xbox & TVs need yet another GUI. Servers need the ability to do EVERY command via GUI, or scripts or text Console. I can't see this ending well. I thought when Ballmer and Sinofsky went that MS would "get it", but no they seem determined to force the "Cloud", half finished ill designed Win 10, abusing privacy, and subscription down people's throats. It would be a great opportunity for OS X (except recent versions are going backwards) and Linux Ubuntu (except current Gnome, Systemd, Unity etc is madness). So even experts are not sure what to do for the best. People are either trying to stick with what they have, OSX or various Linux (Mint with Mate Desktop seems to be doing better than Ubuntu). It's not pretty. If Win 10 is so great why has MS to not just give it free but make it very hard to avoid it?
The idea of replicating iTunes and Playstore for Laptop/Desktop windows is doomed. Even Apple hasn't locked down OS X like that.
Subscription model for software is a total rip off. That's why Adobe has changed to it and MS wants to change to it.
I can't recommend anything to anyone any more.
If you only do email, writing and Web, then Linux Mint.
If you want to do advanced media editing, then maybe OS X. You'll need a new computer and lots of money. Apple may scrap Mac and OS X any year. They only have a commitment to their own hardware, and only when it's making good money. The Mac Servers are gone. The iPod Classic is gone. Though iThings are very expensive Apple will not let you access the onboard data via USB storage, you have to use an iTune client. Nor will they add a 50c SD card socket (the connections and SW cost effectively nothing).
If you have a load of specialist Windows applications and you are on XP, then Win7 / Win8 / Win10 might not work anyway. WINE on Linux might or might not work.