jtriangle

I'd take it however they wanted to do it honestly. Steam/proton is a decent enough platform, and, I'm more than willing to jump through any hoops that they decide are necessary (likely for anti-piracy reasons).

Sure, you wouldn't buy 20 licenses and yolo your whole company into it. You'd buy one license, or a trial, and make sure it works for what you need it for. Trials are available for existing platforms, so, stands to reason that they'd also be available for a linux version. I don't personally see fragmentation as a huge issue, nor is the lack of fragmentation a great selling point when the alternative is essentially indentured servitude to adobe. All of the fragmentation is solved by using PDF if you need to ship a file somewhere, hence "portable document format", which is a trick that psd/psb/ai/idd/etc were never meant to be used for. Also, I've not found CC to be as stable as CS5/5.5 was back in the day, it's gone downhill since then. The GPU acceleration has broken a number of times on the workstations that I've supported and it's crashed the whole app on numerous occasions. It's always happened after an update, and has usually been solved by running DDU and getting the latest graphics drivers, but not always. This isn't on whitebox hacked together workstations either, they're all nice Dell workstations that don't otherwise have issues. Also, Adobe support is worse than useless, so when you run into issues, your best bet is to google the problem and hope that someone's fixed it previously. I'd also hazard to say that your opinions of affinity have insufficient qualifications to have your opinions taken seriously, being as you're an adobe fanboi and don't really use Affinity in a serious manner. I've got 15 workstations with photo/designer on them and the comparison is better than 1:1. Affinity is just better all around, it's snappier, the UI is more efficient, and it's been just as stable as the CC apps. Further, we gave the users the choice to use one or the other after having them use Affinity photo/designer exclusively for a couple weeks and not a single person wanted to go back to CC.

You don't have to be a genius to look at a product offering and realize that it's more than adequate for your needs. At this point, there's a wealth of knowledge on youtube about how Affinity, and many other apps, work. And, factually, having used the apps, it's abundantly clear that they don't intend to just replace AdobeCC, but instead build a better app all around. That shouldn't come as a surprise, Adobe is in an unenviable situation with their apps. If they changed them enough that they would work better, they'd break all kinds of legacy support, not to mention the collective user screeching would be downright deafening if they changed the UI/Workflow, even if those changes were objectively improving things. That's also why Affinity is uniquely positioned to capture the Linux market. Being that they're a smaller company, with a much, much smaller codebase to manage, which makes it a much cheaper proposition than it would be for adobe.

There were 11 million PC's sold in the USA during Q1 2020, so, that's 396K linux installs. Affinity needs 10,000 of them to buy software to break even. Again, that's only PC's sold this year, and only in the US, using your numbers. By your logic, they shouldn't bother with OSX users either, because it's wasted money when you could just write windows software. Windows is the overwhelming majority of the market afterall, so, according to what you're saying, Affinity should discontinue support for OSX, because it's only 9.6% of the market. Totally not worth it. Or, perhaps it's not the 80's anymore, your greybeard perspective is clouded at best, and there's a large enough market on any platform to make plenty of profit from, if you bother to build it.

As an arch user, I'd be more than happy to have a SteamOS like distro to run Affinity in, and that's probably a viable course of action because they'd have absolute control over the OS out of the box. Also, for clarity, Affiniti themselves estimated that it'd be $500k to port it over. Not zero money, but, that's only around 10k licenses to break even at the current pricing. My assumption is that the current install base is much, much larger than 10,000 users. They could likely also hedge that a little by offering an enterprise support tier for bigger money. The fact is, the only option on Linux being half-speed adobeCC is a piss poor one. Sure it comes cracked out of the box, but it is very slow. I've used it, it's terrible, and I have an AMD GPU, which normally works fine for steam/proton. What they're looking at is a smaller market, but one that would have zero options if it weren't for Affinity.

The big production houses are all using proprietary software that they've had written for their uses. That, and big production houses are a tiny market because there's not that many of them. The real money for affinity is in the average joes who have enough of a brain to not want to get tied into the Adobe Serfdom Pay Per Month plan. That's a growing market of tech-savvy people, and tech savvy people tend to at least know about linux, and the ones that have the ability to do so, run it as their main OS. Aside from that, you have your average corporate market, who shells out big money for adobe products. They're all pining for a viable alternative to the subscription model, but there isn't one at the moment. Many corporate environments are using linux workstations where they can, because the licensing is cheaper and it's overall a better choice for a reliable managed workstation. The only thing realistically keeping Linux from being the OS of choice in most cases is the lack of microsoft office, and the lack of a viable alternative to Adobe's products. Office alternatives are getting close, and 3rd party PDF management is getting close, but there's nothing even remotely close on the creative side of things. Sooner or later Adobe is going to get on board, and once they do, Affinity is back in the same boat as it is now, where they're competing with a huge, well known company. If affinity doesn't think it can sell 10,000 licenses to cover the cost of porting to linux, that's their call. It seems fairly nominal to me, but perhaps their install base is much smaller than I'd imagine, or their marketing is much less effective than I'd imagine.

Seeing as affinity is very happy to hide all of the users clamoring for a linux version in this thread, I've copied my, now locked reply, below. If you want a no-nonsense experience, Ubuntu is probably the last distro I would consider. Sure its install base is large, it also comes with a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff, and, while its userbase is large, they're not as savvy, so, more tech support issues from users who just don't know what they're doing in general.The play is to go with something more vanilla, like debian, or, something with a better userbase, like manjaro. Focusing on a single distro is a good move from a development standpoint, especially if you can open source a good portion of the code and let the community fix stuff when it breaks. Obviously all of the imaging algos would have to remain closed source, but, no reason things like gui/localization can't be supported directly by the community.When the idea of supporting linux was brought up, it was suggested that it'd be $500k USD to develop. This was years ago, and, that seems like a high estimate either way, but, I do wish they'd consider that there will probably be a point when they can't afford not to develop a linux version. I'd guess that adobe has plans to do so, and many companies are moving away from microsoft, and those that aren't have two hangups, adobe and microsoft office. With office documents being well supported with online services now, and it's only a matter of time before O365 is 100% a web app, the real hangup is adobe products.Being that adobe is something of a leviathan, they can't pivot like affinity can pivot, so, at the moment, affinity is uniquely poised to get ahead of the curve. If the real cost is $500k USD, that's only 10,000 installs, which given that adobe has ~300 million users onboarded into creative cloud, and with the growth of linux OS's, it really does make sense that they'd pull the trigger on this.My worry is that they won't port it over to linux, adobe will, and they'll steadily lose market share until they're just another "remember that app, it was cool, back in the day" story.

If you want a no-nonsense experience, Ubuntu is probably the last distro I would consider. Sure its install base is large, it also comes with a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff, and, while its userbase is large, they're not as savvy, so, more tech support issues from users who just don't know what they're doing in general. The play is to go with something more vanilla, like debian, or, something with a better userbase, like manjaro. Focusing on a single distro is a good move from a development standpoint, especially if you can open source a good portion of the code and let the community fix stuff when it breaks. Obviously all of the imaging algos would have to remain closed source, but, no reason things like gui/localization can't be supported directly by the community. When the idea of supporting linux was brought up, it was suggested that it'd be $500k USD to develop. This was years ago, and, that seems like a high estimate either way, but, I do wish they'd consider that there will probably be a point when they can't afford not to develop a linux version. I'd guess that adobe has plans to do so, and many companies are moving away from microsoft, and those that aren't have two hangups, adobe and microsoft office. With office documents being well supported with online services now, and it's only a matter of time before O365 is 100% a web app, the real hangup is adobe products. Being that adobe is something of a leviathan, they can't pivot like affinity can pivot, so, at the moment, affinity is uniquely poised to get ahead of the curve. If the real cost is $500k USD, that's only 10,000 installs, which given that adobe has ~300 million users onboarded into creative cloud, and with the growth of linux OS's, it really does make sense that they'd pull the trigger on this. My worry is that they won't port it over to linux, adobe will, and they'll steadily lose market share until they're just another "remember that app, it was cool, back in the day" story.