[Affinity products for Linux]

I think that most people have the same common sense that leads us to think you're right. It is unfortunate that members of the Afinity company think otherwise and turn their faces to another place as if they had not read your message or simply keeping it in the bay of things that will never happen. It is unfortunate to see such situations, there is no commitment to the future.

[Affinity products for Linux]

Hello, I have asked the official email if they have plans for Linux and they have answered me no.

I leave a copy of the email in Spanish:

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Hola, muy buenas tardes, me gustaría obtener una respuesta oficial por parte de la compañía sobre el siguiente tema:

• ¿Tienen planes para lanzar Afinity Photo para Linux?.
• Si no tienen planes, ¿es un no rotundo para siempre?.
• ¿Cual es la visión / misión de la compañía?
• ¿Es posible que alguien de manera oficial aparezca en un tema relacionado en el foro? https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/47502-affinity-products-for-linux/&page=39&tab=comments#comment-495478

Sería interesante que la comunidad de Linux conozca las intenciones reales de la compañía para no continuar divagando sobre la posibilidad de la existencia de algún producto para Linux o no y evitar confusiones y discusiones.

 

He ingresado al sitio WEB en español y he visto la sección de "contacto", pero en ningún lugar estipulan si solo contestan correos redactados en inglés o no, por lo cual asumí que si el sitio estaba traducido al español y que a demás en la página de contacto no decía nada, era porque me pueden responder en el mismo idioma.

 

Muchas gracias.

Response:

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Hola yhojann

Gracias por tu email.

Actualmente no tenemos planes de llevar nuestras aplicaciones a Linux, lo siento.

Hay varios empleados de Serif que se han declarado como tales en esa misma publicación del foro.

Saludos cordiales,

Steven

Ok, I think it is not worth continuing this debate, it has been very clear to me the intentions of the company in every way, it is a matter of seeing that they do not even deign to tell me what the mission or vision of the company is. Thanks for the time.

[Affinity products for Linux]

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I am not sure if you did read my lines carefully (in general, for all what I am reading below...) 

Excuse me, I try my best to try to understand as much as I can. I do not understand English, I only speak Spanish and I am making a great effort to use the Google translator and filter the writing errors that are possible for me.

I have seen a very clear intention on your part to try to refute (with justification or not) most of the issues, but you are not impartial with respect to the existing editors, you are not able to assume where you are not right and then rebut. I understand that it will be difficult to find a point of flexibility where we can reach a mutual agreement. I do not know if you work for Afinity or you are a purist of the brand, but it is difficult to show our views and this can also cause confusion in people who have the ability to make decisions in the company and read your messages.

With respect to the use of GPU on Wine, it is possible to perform a passthrough, but this requires that my operating system can not use the screen or that it has more than one screen and more than one graphics card. It costs less money to buy a Windows license. I do not think it is a comfortable, official or recommended alternative.

Redhat will clearly never take a step to create a graphic design editor because it is not their vision or mission, Redhat is focused on servers and productivity in the management and administration of systems, it is like saying that a butcher shop softwares. Canonical is a bad example, they have very bad taste for design and do not give importance to the experience of the end user, to my point of view canonical is a company badly organized in many ways with a mentality of a grandfather of 90 years, so that you will hardly ever see that Canonical is dedicated to creating a graphic editor or more robust applications, they are very busy solving bugs and giving support with hardware compatibility, selling support, etc. Canonical never had a clear vision in this regard. I use ubuntu for convenience but in user environment I prefer Mac, although in tools and versatility I prefer gnu / linux, the problem is that there is nothing really useful like Photoshop or Afinity Photo for gnu / linux and I hope you understand me, but that causes a lot of frustration

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The first step is that it generates money. You can have a vision for it, yeah, but the main thing is that it generates money as people need it for their families, and if they don't get their salary paid, they 'd go to where the grass is greener. Indeed, is pretty hard to retain the really good ones. And that's only one of the huge and many costs for a company.

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But to focus on the main thing in that point, nope, it does not work so : A company focus in its specific users, consumers or buyers, call them however.  Not in the entire world.

I do not agree with your fracas, anyway we both know that what you explain is not an absolute truth, your words I take it as a personal point of view only.

My point of view is completely different from yours, a company must not only ensure to generate money as a main cause, I know that your workers need money and its owner too. A company must be based on principles, a company without a user can not exist, just as a government without people can not exist, a company is not a virus or a tumor, it must be a medicine that helps the body that we are all of us, giving a value added to the community through its services. For example, a bank must exist to maintain the economic stability of a country, but it also has tools that facilitate its use for people, through mobile applications, virtual executives, etc. Clearly there is a commercial competition, but I also believe that we should not be blind to people and believe that the world revolves around money. Large companies that have this mentality have grown enormously as has Go Outdoors, Virgin and the like.

My opinion is not based on what I believe simply, but also on facts, studies and advice. I am not saying that your arguments are not based on studies, but I do say that my argument can be as valid as yours, although I must admit that under my arguments the business models work better.

It is impressive to recognize that it is necessary to reach this point trying to argue commercial points of view to try to explain the need to have a technical tool.

If the creator of Krita has stressed that his software is not a replacement for Photoshop it is because he clearly wants to avoid lawsuits, I have used Krita and Photoshop and it is largely a brazen but legal copy.

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They fight each other  (and historically have, at times fiercely) enough to not consider them a duo in anything.... 

Or that looks like legal issues.

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But somehow (again, I say this entertained, not angry) you somehow mention, state,  that I have not been involved in certain businesses where I have worked almost all my professional life... well. 

Sorry, but for your comments, it did not look like it.

With regard to the use of color profiles, I give you every reason.

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Nobody? Or you, particularly?

I mean the total number of users that we publish. If 100000000 use your graphic editor but 10000 use the other software, it does not mean that it has few users (I guess it happens in a similar way when trying to compare the possible users of graphic editors between windows and linux. If linux has a low percentage of users this does not mean that the numerical quantity is low.).

In the other topics that you mention, they are redundant topics that we already argued and would be in an infinite loop.

I can conclude personally:

If you were working in my company I would hire you as a programmer and not for the business area definitely.

I think your arguments in several points are valid, but in others, no, anyway your arguments, whether they have a real basis or not, are not official, which is why I prefer a "good debate", but not to understand what the company in charge of Afinity really thinks about it. Even they may have a mentality totally contrary to yours, so, try to continue to refute your views would be like doing it with the person sitting next to me, we would only have conclusions but without any progress.

It would be interesting, as once happened in the Adobe forum, that we could see the response of a person who can give an answer in an official way (or as close as possible to the official) about whether someday they will have intentions or not to launch your products for the Linux environment.

I feel that somehow, all of us who have debated in this thread have lost time. I do not mean that the points of view discussed here are not valid, but we have been discussing an important issue only among ourselves without knowing the company's point of view, so even if we have millions of answers, the company can simply observe comfortably without pronouncing about it.

I have also concluded that my comments about a blind company without vision does not necessarily apply to this since we do not know how to think. This opens a gap in the possibility that some day we may see some application for Linux.

I hope that over time we can see a real solution for Gnu / Linux users. I hope that this race for money does not end up affecting people negatively (more than what they have already done). I do not want to say that the commercial world has not created great things, but just as it has created them, it has also destroyed them.

Science, art, philosophy, bases of many civilizations, not everything in life or in the growth of the human being is translated into money.

As long as I live, I will try to believe that it is still possible.

 

[Affinity products for Linux]

Hi,

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But... one can run PS CC on Wine. (ie, in WineHQ PS CC 2015 is in gold rating, 2018 Silver).  Isn't that enough ?

Wine can not use GPU, the performance is very bad and unestable, i can not run Adobe CC over Wine, Playonlinux or Proton without crashes on big projects (400mb of size or more).

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Duopoly? Nope, is just where there are more sells, typically. At least, fully tested and with solid numbers in this particular field. Obviously not considering how many servers are running Linux, or the IOT, or , the other several areas where Linux wins by physical K.O. Each field has its own world and characteristics, like: market, user base, OS adaptation to the particular profession workflows, drivers for the pro hardware devices of the field (typically brutally expensive hardware in graphics content creation, as to then find out there's no driver for sth so "rare" and "specific", u might say the vendors are the culprit for not providing a driver for Linux, and we enter in an endless circle (the chicken and the egg dilema), as the companies can't move to some place where they are not seeing currently demostrable profit possibilities.),  so, not having the needed  "ecosystem", like also even other graphic software apps, which often need to be the ones that currently the other companies and clients are actively using, due to native formats, other forms of compatibility, etc, etc.

There are no graphics drivers ?, Nvidia provides drivers officially for quite some time, I think you've been in a very old time on what was GNU / Linux.

Today there is something so "strange" as Software and Hardware, for example Id Software has launched all its biggest Linux games in a completely native way without virtualization or software interpretation, for example Doom4, Other companies like the creators of Tekken 7 have given support for Linux environments and so I could mention many developers under the SteamOS distribution. It is enough to support gnome or kde and that's it.

If Linux is a sunken market, then why has Microsoft bet on it?, Google has not released its suites for Windows and Mac, but has tried to focus on online applications to maintain a livable coexistence with systems such as Linux.

But, let's talk about the desktop environment.

It is unfair (as I have said in the Adobe forums) to compare the entire world of the Desktop with possible users of a specific application, bearing in mind that not all desktop users are possible target users of a single product (commercially speaking ). Are 100% of Windows users a target audience? No, but this percentage that Windows uses and that if it can be a possible user is more than enough to invest. With Linux the situation is different since the vast majority of Linux users are people with computer skills, generally software developers, usually a software developer must also do layout and design. We could conclude that Linux has a lower quota of use of the desktop than Windows, but it does not mean that it has such a significant quota in the use of graphic design applications and software development.

But, let's talk about the business strategy.

The largest companies know, money is not everything, a great business also includes the satisfaction of your customers and potential customers, great ideas become big projects, ideas that are helpful to people. Infinity born from the idea of satisfying a need for designers or simply generating money because of something you have to live ?, Coarsely speaking you have to earn money, but the vision of a company can not be based on obtaining money but on how to help your customers. For this reason Lightworks, Skype and many others not only offer solutions for Mac and go far beyond what they can sell, for example the contributions made by Google to society through its technologies.

A closed company that says it will not support a number of people because it does not leave money is because it has serious problems of direction, vision and mission.

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Software development... Well, I have worked in a bunch of those, and also in video games ones, and the latter could make more use of pure painting programs (yet image editing is more heavily needed even in those), but the former typically need solely image editing tools, speaking about the raster tools. So...Why krita and not Gimp?

Do you confess that Kitra and Gimp can replace Infinity Photo?. Krita is a better alternative (You can use multiple layers, vectorize, apply the same styles of Photoshop on the layers, even use the same tecturas, the layout of tools are inspired by photoshop, the filters are not only similar but are placed in the same order, etc. By copyright issues it can not be the same as photoshop but it is the best alternative that exists) but it is still very unstable, it is difficult to work with complex layers. I think Adobe Photoshop and Infinity Photo are better software and would save me a lot of time in design, besides having better support. That he wants it for Linux does not mean that it should be free.

Gimp is an editor of images and not of vectors, for which, to perform a complex work as a flyer composed of images and vectors without losing quality when resizing is impossible. We both know that Krita and Gimp are not a replacement for Infinity, although it's not worth continuing to argue.

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Specially if a company is a software developer, as then the use cases would typically go from making icons, splash screens, banners, graphics for the company sites and any web apps, stuff for corporate image and print, etc, etc

Clearly you are not a software developer and you are not involved, but I do, I have more than 20 years of experience in different softwares and graphic design companies and I can correctly say that you are wrong.

A company that creates software not only creates software. Commercially speaking, a company must be scalable, that is, it must have more than one business area, it can not put everything in one hand. Many companies that develop software or freelancers must create the website, make their layout, flyers, corporate image, promotional videos, etc. Generally, software development companies are also producers, marketing, market research, implementation of technologies, etc. All these companies and freelances are closing their doors on their faces because "it does not leave enough money".

If Infinity photo were available for Linux, what would change is that companies would no longer need desktop computers with linux and designers with mac, this would eliminate the great cost of having to buy a mac computer. That's why I say:

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Duopoly? Nope, is just where there are more sells, typically

Yepe, it's a duopoly, but you may not know it or you do not want to know.

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here don't know the mare magnum of requested features and stuff right now in the works, fronts opened (launching /polishing Publisher, maintaining versions of two (or three) apps in Win/Mac/iOS...and we can't even guess the iceberg tip of it))

Publisher is like the song that nobody listens to from a musical group that became famous for a single song. Let's talk about graphic design editors.

Thanks for the patience to read.

[Affinity products for Linux]

Other duopoly Microsoft/Apple application? when I see the news of a new graphic design application I thought that it will really make a difference, but I see that it is not like that.

I have a software development company and we must forcefully use Krita because all our teams use some distribution based on Debian for security reasons and unfortunately we can not buy Adobe licenses because Adobe does not support us. All that remains is to wait for another company that really offers a multiplatform application for design to appear.