Argo

Well, time will tell.

Except .Net, MS SQL now run on Linux, Linux shells can run inside Windows - by demand from Microsoft developers, a (growing) number of consumer devices - gaming consoles - run on Linux, and professional media studio software such as Da Vinci and Houdini support Linux. All of these have brought their software to Linux and maintained it there - because expert designers or developers benefit from using an environment over which they have full control. This is not a story of tinkerers. I am not interested in opinions. I am not here for a teatime discussion - pardon me for being bold about that. I have worked in very large companies. I am keenly aware of both business needs, and possibilities, but most of all I am concerned about mine. Metal: so what? There are a number of cross-platform accelerated rendering APIs, and cross-platform UI toolkits. Some of them more accessible and/or as efficient as "Metal" or other "UI kits". I wager that these bindings don't form the whole of the API behind Affinity, otherwise it wouldn't exist on Windows. I am not very interested in Gimp or Krita either at this point - both are evolving from codebases that have not provided full satisfaction. Krita is unstable, Gimp is coarse, unfriendly. It has come a long way, it is starting to shape up - but that's where it has come up to this point. In Affinity, I saw - and see the potential to leave abusive lifetime licensing models behind. I find that they hurt consumers. I am fine paying to support a project I believe in - I paid for my Affinity license. I'd have paid more. However - no SDK? No format specification? No Linux port. How is this thing ever going to live and breathe. It needs to reach deep within its community. It cannot stand on just the strength of a small and solid team.

1. Others with creative suites don't do it. You get a niche, and marketing value. 2. The codebase is, by and large, the same you'd have to run on Mac. This is how a number of video games are ported from Windows to MacOS (Tomb Raider, etc.). What they "seem" to have in common with Affinity products is that they don't rely on a native UI toolkit. 3. Support cost can be reduced. Linux users support themselves: give them broad strokes, broad strokes would be enough. 4. Finally, the Linux market, as is obvious with 21 pages on this thread, is largely underestimated. Top design products, such as Houdini or Da Vinci Resolve, are distributed on Linux, because top professionals and studios like to work on Linux. So-called "power users" or creatives like me dual boot, but wish we could loose the last anchors that tie us to Windows - or to Gimp - and embrace a reliable, a sound product for graphics editing that runs on Linux. I'll assume we're in the couple of tens of millions whose professional activity is not properly reflected in online usage statistics.