[Lightroom to Affinity Transition]

Does Affinity make permanent changes to your original photo? If so, does it create a copy? Dldo is Affinity adding any library/,photo management system?

[Lightroom to Affinity Transition]

As Lightroom user for many years, and occasional Nik software and old photoshop Elements user, I have yet to submit to the combo LR/Photoshop subscription.  I am an amateur photographer,  purely for enjoyment. All of my 50,000 photos all are saved with xmp sidecar files, and not in dng format.  If I were to use Affinity,  how would it handle my xmp sidecar files? Would it automatically convert to tiff? If not then what then? I need to know what would happen to all my years of editing.  If I converted all files to dng, would that work better and therefore affinity have my edited photos?