UPDATE & SOLVED (Maybe): After fidling with this thing for over a month I may have found a solution. Perhaps this may help someone in the future, but you may want to read the context portion following the steps before implementing as everyone's problem can be slightly different. What it boils down to is an uninstall/re-install of CC and Photoshop - and that is, in fact, one of the troubleshooting measures offered by Big A. What they don't mention is that Adobe sprinkles crap around your computer like lawnseed so you're not trully "uninstalling" anything with the uninstaller or the next level Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool. That being said...
• Download the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool from Adobe, you'll need it later.
• Quit Creative Cloud Desktop.
• Open Activity Monitor and quit any Adobe process still running. You'll find many because CC never dies, it just goes into another room to talk behind your back. It's passive-aggressive like that.
• Go to Applications and use the uninstallers for the individual CC apps such as Photoshop, etc. (note: it's probably okay to uninstall them from Creative Cloud prior to quitting in the first step, but this is the method I used).
• Uninstall Creative Cloud with the included uninstaller.
• Open and run the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool. Burn everything down, clean it all.
• Go to your User/Home folder and delete the 'Creative Cloud Files' file.
• Go to Applications > Utilities and delete all the Adobe stuff there, too.
• Go to your User > Library, go through everything and delete all things Adobe. "But I just ran Adobe uninstallers and their uber cleaner tool, what could there possibly be to delete?" you might ask yourself. You will be confronted with the folly of this assumtion as you go through every file and discover what remains. Obviously Applications Support, Cache, and Preferences are the big ones. But there's stuff everywhere. I think I kept logs without any issues. (note: I also did this in an additional administrator account that I previously ran Adobe in, not sure if that played a role).
• Go through the System > Library and do the same thing.
• Empty the Trash. Good riddance, digital garbage.
• Give permissions to the /tmp folder. Theoretically I don't think you should have to do this, but it did seem to have an effect in my case. Open Terminal and type: sudo chmod 1777 /tmp
• Hit Return, enter computer password, hit return again.
• Restart. Or if you want to do overkill - Shutdown, wait 15 seconds and reboot.
• Open the browser of your choice, go to Adobe, log into your Creative Cloud account and download CC (note: you can download Photoshop first and it will include both).
• I opened Photoshop, quit, and rebooted here. This was almost certainly inconsequential, but I've gone nuclear at this point.
So that seemed to work. As I stated in the beginning Photoshop appeared to work fine - until it didn't. My gut was telling me it wasn't a problem with my hardware or PS settings, and that seems to be supported by the fix. I'm blazing away with GPU, OpenCL, Native Canvas, fonts, syncing and all that good stuff enabled - no problems. All the previos offered solutions, including the (confusingly varried) Adobe instructions for removal and reinstallation. Only after doing some additional pruning in the directory libraries on the umpteenth intall did I see some improvement. I got past the 5-9 minutes where the system started to hang (actuallly close to an hour I think), but saving still took forever and I experienced the same system hang upon quitting. Around that time I noticed crash logs for the Adobe installs indicating an inability to access the /tmp files, which led me to incoporate the tmp files permission step. Adobe did appear to be putting files here, however, and I received the same crash log on the subsequent install. The only differnce was this time Photoshop actually worked. I'm not entirely sure if that was the result of the more intense directory library pruning I did, or altering those permissions. Or both.
I remain confused by many aspects of this ordeal. And it wasn't a mere inconvenience - it lasted over a month, significantly impacting my work. But the biggest questions are: why? and how come Adobe couldn't offer better guidance? The "why?"is confounding. I'm running an up-to-date OS and Adobe environment and then this stuff drops in out of nowhere. And if the problem was indeed permissions related, why now? My present home user/administrator is barely 4 months old and built from the goround up (not migrated) because of an earlier Big Sur related catastrophy. Not expecting any answers here, but living in a post-Big Sur world sucks. Little problems have system-wide consequences, and troubleshooting takes forever as the computer chokes on misfires and faux kernel panics.
Adobe is not blameless, though. One of the proposed solutions was a clean re-install of CC and Photoshop. I was baffled as to why that didn't work. Tearing it all down and starting fresh should be like, well, starting fresh. And rolling back to a previous version that worked only to discover the same problems? That doesn't make any sense. Except that it does make sense if you take into account the fact Adobe has been taking a dump in every corner of my computer for the past few decades. Sprinkle some useless "uninstallers" on top of that and you've discovered the recipe for sadness. Every other app you can think of manages to do it's job without having to scatter junk in evey nook and cranny of my Mac. And doesn't require increasingly baroque levels of access. The processes that run and run (some you can't quit) are mind-boggling. One or both of these things prevented me from using an app that, if left to its own devices, appears to work perfectly well.
So, yes Apple is horrible for continuing to unleash their 1st drafts on the world and pretend like nothing is wrong. And I sympathize with you, Adobe, for having to react to all their weird, big moves. But it's not okay to have 15 different instructions on your site about how to uninstall/reinstall CC, and have none of them completely do that! Reinstalling is valid corrective measure that should cure a whole host of ills with CC and its associated apps. It shouldn't be particularly problematic either with the cloud-based authentication we enjoy. So why then did I spend a month seeking exotic solutions to something as simple as installing a f****** app!?! THIS IS SOMETHING YOU CAN, AND NEED, TO DO BETTER!!! And also scale back on the bloated, unnecessary processes. It's lazy and gratuitous. Get your s*** together. Love you, bye.
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