Michael Tunnell
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Posts posted by Michael Tunnell
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23 minutes ago, wonderings said:
I would say Affinity picked a horrible name for Publisher as well as Microsoft Publisher is widely hated by those in the print industry. Not saying GIMP is a great name by any means but I think at the end of the day if the software works well and gets the job done who really cares what it is called?
This is a very old problem. The name has been an issue since the beginning in the 1990s. Both products using the same term is not a big deal, that's pretty insignificant. GIMP is a awful name because it's an insult to disabled people. (that's not even mentioning the Pulp Fiction reference, which they actually did on purpose 🤦♂️)
The name is very problematic because many educational institutions refuse to teach a class on it due to this. This also applies to many corporations who don't want to promote it due to it being completely inappropriate. It creates a massive unnecessary problem just for the the sake of being "edgy".
It means GNU Image Manipulation Program . . . it's sad that a project making an Application, or any type of Software couldn't come up with a synonym for Program. I mean seriously, GIMS is better anyway because it could have been pronounced as gems. It was a dumb decision to do it in the first place and it is a dumb decision to keep it.
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with that said, it's not even about the name that why most professionals don't use it. It's because it has had over 25 years of development yet is still somehow doesnt have non-destructive editing on pretty much any of it.
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Affinity could instantly become dominant in Linux if they put the effort in and in doing so they would also provide more reason for people to switch to Linux becoming a selling point for Linux making it so that people who promote Linux will also promote Affinity for free.
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9 minutes ago, Snapseed said:
If businesses like yours and the members of the Academy Software Foundation (please see aswf[dot]io ), such as Microsoft, were to put money into supporting full time developers for Gimp then it would only be a matter of time before Gimp became professional grade software.
This is a nice ideal but that requires the GIMP team to be receptive to it and it also requires that team to be willing to take on that task of becoming a professional grade tool. Unfortunately, this has not been the case historically with this project. This is why professionals on Linux want something else to embrace Linux because there is an opportunity that is being squandered and after 20+ years, we don't expect GIMP to be the project to take advantage of this opportunity.
I now use PhotoPea since it is a webapp and it doesnt matter what OS I use which is a good option for now but I'd certainly love it for Affinity Photo to be on Linux. Snap team will even directly help them find out how to do it, or Affinity could make a Flatpak as well. WINE, Proton, etc so many methods to work on Linux if they chose to attempt it. There is a market for Linux both in the high side of the Big Spenders like VFX companies as @justajeffy mentions and on the low side where people are more likely to switch to Linux due to having that graphics software piece available to them. Linux already has good video editor options but graphics tools are limited. The Linux market is thirsty for an option and it is ripe to take advantage of but companies don't see that and sadly that is not surprising.
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7 hours ago, wonderings said:
Marketshare can be a good tool to see in which direction people are headed.
NetMarketShare showed growth for Linux as a platform on the desktop month over month since April of this year. This should be more valuable than Steam considering not everyone who would want to use this kind of software would be gamers. Steam is way too narrow of a metric to use as a decision source alone.
7 hours ago, wonderings said:Any business after 7 years should be seeing growth.
Linux is not a business. It is a term to describe a platform that consists of many businesses including Canonical (makes Ubuntu), SUSE (makes SLE & openSUSE) and Red Hat (makes RHEL & Fedora). These companies are growing every year with Red Hat being a multi-billion dollar company that was acquired by IBM last year for $34 Billion. Linux is growing in every aspect. The problem with Linux is that its confusing to keep track of because there are multiple variables for everything.
7 hours ago, wonderings said:There can be dips of course and maybe that is all there is to it with Linux gaming, but this is not a business for the end user but a platform for gaming and if they are either moving away because of a smaller catalogue or not enjoying the experience on Linux, then it is a bad sign.
This is a poor point because most companies arent even trying it and thus most users aren't trying it. As I said, this is a Catch-22. There are many people who have never heard of Linux even though Linux dominates every facet of computing outside of the Desktop. The fact that Linux doesn't have a marketing team, because it isnt a company, is a problem. When there are advocates for it they are met with dismissal.
7 hours ago, wonderings said:The question I would have though comes to support. Sure the Affinity suite is going to work on all distros now (assuming it was developed using these universal formats), but will different issues arise based on the users distro of choice? Is Serif going to have to still support a variety of distros logging and dealing with issues that could arise?
Snaps & Flatpaks are retrieved from separate stores but they each have one store. Snap Store & the FlatHub eliminate a lot of the headaches of app distribution on Linux these days. You simply make the software work with the formats and the runtimes that power the formats. In the case of Snaps, support for Snaps as a format is managed by Canonical who makes Snaps. Developers of Snap Apps don't have to worry about if it works on a given distro, it either does or it doesnt. If it doesnt then triage can be sent to either the Distro Developers that implemented Snaps or Canonical to either solve the problem with you or for you.
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3 hours ago, Blende21 said:This is where the Linux market is found, and probably where development hours (and money) goes.
The Linux market is everything outside of the desktop. Linux either has a majority on everything else or a dominance. The development hours in Linux are spread around because it is thousands of people and hundreds of companies involved including all of the giant companies . . . even Microsoft and Apple contribute to Linux.
3 hours ago, Blende21 said:Sorry, penguin lovers, but I do not think this business case will ever fly.
Thankfully, I don't think you make their business decisions so that's good.
3 hours ago, Blende21 said:it just proves that they assume there is money to be made
There are companies in the $Billions level that rely on Linux and Red Hat is even an example of a company exclusive to Linux based products that is worth $Billions. There is money to be made, there is no assumption. Microsoft is doing a sneaky play of trying to play both sides in order to cash in regardless which is smart.
3 hours ago, Blende21 said:Just follow the forum and make a search for words like „crash“ to see what is going on. Far too many posts out of far too many reasons. To fix this one needs all hands on deck, not having valuable developers fooling around with yet another project.
This is self-defeating development logic. There will always be bugs and there will always be crashes. This is the nature of software because nothing can be perfect while things change. If any variable involved changes like hardware, version of an OS, libraries of an OS, etc then bugs can be introduced even if the software itself didn't change after reaching "crash-free" status. Windows changes every week to some degree which can create issues and Microsoft has proven they will even delete people's files at random due to their lack of QA.
If a company only focused on bug fixes and crash fixing then that company would never innovate or grow. You talk about Linux being a bad business decision yet you also want them to have all hands on deck working on something that is impossible to achieve rather than driving forward with features, improvements and other value. Of course Bug Squashing is important but its never an all hands on deck scenario because that means 1. the company is managed poorly or 2. they are dealing with a catastrophic failure.
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On 8/11/2020 at 10:43 AM, Mark Ingram said:
In July 2020, only 0.86% (and declining) of Steam gamers were on Linux.
Marketshare is a fickle thing to measure because of a variety of factors. For example, gaming is a bad metric to use because Gaming on Linux has only existed since 2013 and it essentially started from scratch with Valve bringing Steam to Linux. You are judging the entire platform based on a single type of user that only had the possibility to exist for 7 years and who has had fight the entire time to convince game developers to pay attention to the platform. This also ignores the size of Steam as a userbase because that is millions so even with that starting point 0.86% of millions is not a small number when looking at context. Plus, Valve sees value in Linux so much that they created a compatibility layer called Proton to make Windows games work in Linux without developers doing anything to make it work. They increased the number of playable games to over 11,000 games with this effort and Proton has only existed for 2 years. If Linux is so insignificant, why are they putting in this effort? It's not about what the market currently is but where it will be because Linux has the potential to dominate this just like it has on everything else.
The discussions we have as Linux users often is an uphill battle. We have to do the convincing for it being worth it but how can we prove it if companies aren't willing to even try? It's a catch-22 issue. We have to have a marketshare that convinces companies to support it but we have to convince companies to support it to get that marketshare.
The interesting thing is that if you look everywhere other than the desktop, Linux marketshare is dominant by wide margins. 70%-90% (depending on source) of the internet is powered by Linux. 100% of the Top 500 Supercomputers in the world are powered by Linux. EE Times says that Linux is 38.42% of Embedded devices compared to Windows' 10.73%. Google's Android is powered by Linux and it has 70.80% of the smartphone market. Linux is even the system of choice for a lot of high-end production companies in the movie industry due to the superior performance for rendering and such. The list just goes on.
I'm not going to pretend that Linux has not had missteps in the past and it has taken awhile to become a viable platform for developers to justify supporting it but I think that time is finally here.
On 8/16/2014 at 2:29 PM, TonyB said:We would only make a Linux version if we were confident we would recoup the $500,000 it would cost us to build it.
Linux has a fairly large marketshare when taken in context for having to claw its way to relevance. Linux doesn't have a trillion dollar company behind it creating marketing campaigns for decades. This is something that holds the platform back but even without that it has still gained a large market in the millions.
The Linux community has effectively given up on Adobe so all of that Adobe frustration can be transformed into value by someone who takes the opportunity to embrace the platform. There are also thousands of people who have expressed over the years that if they had a good alternative to Photoshop or Illustrator that they would switch to Linux because they hate Windows and don't want to deal with Apple. There is a market here.
There is also a passionate hunger to support companies that treat Linux with relevance. As you can see, over the past 6 years that the Linux community is very passionate but what you have not seen is that when companies embrace the platform we in return embrace them. Its not only that we would pay for the software if it supported Linux, most of us would be willing to pay more as a thank you for just letting us use the OS we want to use.
This passion has been proven on crowdfunding platforms many times. I know you don't want to use a crowdfunding model but the excitement and passion from the Linux community to support companies that support us has been shown multiple times. I'd be happy to give examples if interested.
One very relevant example of Linux passion is Photopea. Photopea is an alternative to Photoshop that works as a webapp, it's not remotely as powerful as Photoshop but it allows people to use Linux rather than dealing with Windows so the excitement around Photopea on Reddit was insane. In fact, I personally switched to Photopea as my daily driver tool because it allowed me to stop running Windows in a VM for Photoshop. I pay for the premium account on Photopea and it is a subscription. Affinity Photo is easily superior to Photopea just as Photoshop is but because Photopea lets me just use the OS I want to, I accept the limitations. I would switch to Affinity Photo (and all the Affinity software) of course but not just that, I'd also promote it like crazy.
On 9/29/2014 at 2:17 PM, Andy Somerfield said:I won't rule out making a Linux version of Affinity, but I need someone to show me a combination of distro, desktop topology and deployment (paid) platform where we would recoup our development costs. If someone can show me that, I'll be willing to talk some more about it all..
This is a valid point, especially in 2014 when it was made. Linux is by far the most secure, reliable, efficient and best performant OS available . . . I mean its not even fair to compare it to Windows in those metrics and even though macOS is essentially a cousin to Linux, Linux still outperforms it most of the time. With all that said, supporting Linux as a developer used to be a nightmare. I get it and up until now I would have completely agreed that supporting Linux and all of the distros is way too much work to justify the return.
However, that is no longer the case thanks to the Universal Formats that exist now such as Snaps & Flatpaks. These formats allow you to create a single build of your application and let people use it in most distros without having to specify anything distro related. So the first part of the quote where it says "combination of distro . . . " you can remove that piece all together because now there are formats you can use to make that variable irrelevant.
As for the desktop topology, I don't really know what that means so I can't answer that piece. I did look it up but I am a designer not a developer so this piece is a bit over my head.
Deployment platform is also solved by Snaps & Flatpaks because they both support proprietary software in their stores. They don't have a payment mechanism necessarily but it looks like you don't have that for Windows either as it seems you just purchase licenses through your website so simply apply that same method to the Linux version and that's solved.
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I apologize for the novel sized reply but I think the potential for Affinity software on Linux is fantastic for both parties (now, thanks to Snaps & Flatpaks). I'll leave you with one last thing to consider.
On Windows and macOS, Affinity is promoted as a "Photoshop Alternative" by the vast majority of users. They promote your competitor to describe your product. In contrast, Linux doesn't have Photoshop so it becomes the go to professional tool for Photo/Design/Publishing software. This means that not only do you become the big fish in our relatively small pond, you also become a marketing tool for the platform.
When Linux users attempt to convince people to use it and run into "does it have Photoshop" then this is a big break point because the best we could do for decades was "we have GIMP" ::shudders:: but if we had Affinity software then the discussion changes from not only convincing people to use Linux but we become salespeople for Affinity. You get a market that is incredibly hungry for a product like yours and you also get a market that actively promotes your product as a definitive option in convincing people to use that platform.
The potential ROI for Affinity is high, the marketshare numbers don't paint a true picture of what the platform offers and I hope I did a better job of painting that picture.
Affinity for Linux
in Feedback for the V1 Affinity Suite of Products
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GIMP does not accept bounties and most Open Source projects do not accept bounties. Sure some do but most of them dont because they dont want to have obligation to implement something in order to receive the funding.