Amadeus Paulussen

Dear Affinity team Dear Affinity users here in the forum I think the time is right for commercial developers like you guys to think about the professional user of the future. A user that may love macOS for its polished UI and ecosystem, but realises that an open source operating system like Linux better fits with their ideology and world view than Apple's closed source "profit first" approach. I do not try to bash Apple here. I also don't want to exclude Windows users, but I don't know many Windows users personally, so I really can't judge what they might want. The kind of user I am referring to might already have installed a modern Linux distribution like Manjaro out of curiosity (and because they feel the desire to move to a platform that they feel they would like to support more) and test ran a couple of apps on it. This kind of user may have come to the conclusion that Linux has actually come a long way and is not that far away from macOS in many respects (and even much ahead of it in some areas). I count myself to this type of professional user. I have at least 10 friends and work colleagues who think alike. They are mostly web developers and use Linux as their daily drivers already. They use open source software and for special needs, like development IDEs, they have forward thinking vendors like JetBrains in their backs who provide them with their cutting edge IDEs and tools for Linux already. For me it is not so easy however, because I am more of a broadly diversified kind of power user who relies not only on open source fundamentals and development IDEs, but also on music production tools like Bitwig Studio (available for Linux!) and Davinci Resolve (available for Linux as well!), just to name a few of my favourites. :) Naturally, in the music and video creation field plugins and extensions are a big part of whats installed on my Macs these days and for this, the market on Linux is actually still quite thin. But there as well, some manufacturers are not forgetting Linux (u-he comes to mind, with their flagship audio plugins amongst others) and so there's a couple of interesting offers available there already as well. To cut a long story short. I made a list of all the apps I am using on macOS today and found/test ran viable alternatives for Linux in many cases (some of them open source, some closed source). Really, the only thing that I could not (and do not want) to replace is Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo! Me and my friends would buy licenses of those apps for Linux in the blink of an eye. That's all I wanted to say. :) Thanks for making Designer, Photo and Publisher), which I bought a license but have not yet used too often! <3 All the best Amadeus