Bez Bezson

Now try windows. All flavours of driver reinstalls, forced updates, unremovable programs and unresponsive programs for days. Windows would be dead today if it wasn't for Task manager. Meanwhile on Linux it's been a damn pleasant surprise. So much "it's difficult" and "don't use it" kept me away for so long and that hurt my experience more by staying with windows than actually going through with the switch.

Gotta be some paleolithic linux version you're using if you're having issues today. I've tried a couple and it's just plug and play. Literally kept around some USB drives and got bunch of different distributions or flavors on them.

Have you tried it?

not developing for linux because of a small market share is shortsighted IMO and I've said exactly why that is a few times here A market only exists after developers make a market usable... That's serif in this case. I don't know about the last 25 years of linux but I do know about the last 5 or so years and Linux is just as capable as windows and mac, just as simple to use (I find macOS more difficult to use than something like POP, Mint or ZorinOS).  Anyway if you really want to argue numbers then Serif should only develop for windows. MacOS holds a tiny share as well. Thats bad because no one wants to see a monopoly or duopoly. People are only using windows and mac because of software support. I don't want to be forced to use either of those. No one wants to be forced to use an OS.

Where are you getting stats that developing for linux results in failure? Lots of creative software exists on Linux alongside Windows and Mac without a problem. Substance, Unity, Unreal, Houdini, Blender all work great and is a handful of the software that are cross platform, I fail to see why Serif would fail in this area alongside them. 

Anyway, I see your points, but I disagree with you on a base level. Your reasoning is flawed IMO.
 

Too bad that more keep switching then, I guess. Have you tried Linux, because I'm pleasantly surprised that it's easy. IDK anything about 2 decades of linux desktop, but recently tried it and it's a pretty honest sell.

Or they could do what Quixel does, and release a platform agnostic .appimage. Or they could do what Adobe does, and just support Redhat.
At the end of the day, Linux is Linux. If it works in one, it'll work in them all. What distro to choose isn't really an issue.

No, Steam for Linux is a native app, and hosts native applications. You can use Proton to install Windows apps through it.

Plus, Substance Painter and Designer are also available standalone.

That's not the point of this thread. People are not trying to make Affinity products Linux-only.

I did, that's because you can just convert the file to run on debian based OS's, which is what I did. So it was a non issue for me. But wait, you say, people don't want to faf around doing that(!) Well, it's a good thing there are universal packages that run on all distros. 

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-convert-between-linux-packages-using-alien/

Ultimately, developers seem to do just fine making applications for linux. How do Applications like Blender work on every distro if it's so super difficult as you say? Why would Serif be any less competent at this?

I've been using it for around 5 years now, recently exclusively, and I haven't had any problems with it.

it's usually not a problem at all, *most* of the time it'll work on all distros just fine. most changes between distros are just the desktop environment, possibly included or not included drivers which can be added later, and a custom selection of included applications which again can be added or removed from all and how far behind in updates the distro is compared to each other.

For example where substance designer only has an rpm format you can still just convert it to be used on debian based distros anyway.

I think people should stop trying to make problems out of non-issues lol. 

True, because that is Linux, as effect of being free and open, a testing bench and a place for debate. Also wrong due to so many misconceptions I see here.
I won't take one by one now, again and again. But packing is not an issue at all. For example, there is a closed source third party LEGO modelling tool, LDCad that uses accelerated graphics and comes as a sh installer. It simply worked for me everywhere, so it's possible. It's also one man's effort, although not simple at all.
No need for snaps, flatpaks, rpms, whatever option like those.
So it's possible.
On the other hand, remember Oracle. You peek one of their supported OSes, like RedHat, Mandriva, CentOS and so on, at the time was launched, and do the specific steps to setup and you are good to go.
I bet if Affinity releases the apps under one or few specific distros, we'll jump to one of those and do our jobs happily.

I'm sorry, but what the hell guys?! You are really arguing about how many commercial apps on Linux?! C'mon this is a thread about Affinity supporting Linux!!!

Seems like Serif is missing this horse while Adobe is not. Adobe launched last week the browser version of Photoshop and Illustrator. Still not supporting all the features but many would be able to use it on Linux and it's just a matter of time for Adobe to add many more features and move other applications on browser. Like The Linux Experiment says in this video, Photoshop is often cited in the main reasons for not switching to Linux (for whom have that interest, many people stick to Win or Mac anyway), meaning that Linux will probably see more users thanks to Adobe.

Certainly a lot less, not sure it's a "tiny part of 1%", but yeah it's probably around 1%-ish.
Still, there's several hundred commercial programs that are profitable on the OS.
No reason why the Affinity suite couldn't be among those.
 
Developing just for Linux? Yeah, that's dumb.
Porting to Linux and doing what's needed to gt it working? It works for a lot of the companies that have  tried it.

Certainly a lot less, not sure it's a "tiny part of 1%", but yeah it's probably around 1%-ish.
Still, there's several hundred commercial programs that are profitable on the OS.
No reason why the Affinity suite couldn't be among those.
 
Developing just for Linux? Yeah, that's dumb.
Porting to Linux and doing what's needed to gt it working? It works for a lot of the companies that have  tried it.

I've got a bunch of games that are't on that list, so it's definitely not even close to comprehensive.

Are you talking about this?; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proprietary_software_for_Linux
Because if so it's not even a full list, I even listed one that's not in there in my last post

I fully agree with you and I am also not one of those 'must only be free to use and must only be able to read the source code' minority zealots (they do speak loudly though). I am fully in favour of paid applications being available on the Linux platform and I'm happy to pay for good software like Pixeluvo and SoftMaker Office, for example. While I cannot buy free software, I do contribute to projects like Gimp so that improvements can be made and in both cases the motivation is the same because developers should be rewarded for the work that they put in to provide us with useful software.
Things are getting better all the while and we now have the Figma and Lunacy graphic editors and I have used Canva for a number of projects. Indeed, it is possible that we might get Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator as online apps some time in the future and that would be very welcome. In your case right now, why not try out PhotoLine with Wine?
I do think though that Serif Affinity are doing exactly the right thing by making an iOS app because iPads are used for a lot of professional design work and that's bringing in quite a lot of money for Serif Affinity that in turn feeds into further improvements.
 

As people have pointed out there are so many commercial applications that are on linux and are used. I use the Substance suite, Blender and Unity, which are my softwares of choice, but forced to use gimp/krita which aren't my choice. It's a mixed bag of FOSS and commercial. I think a lot of people consider Linux as a whole some kind of anti-consumer, anti-commercial, anti-paid software OS for hobbyist programmers with tinfoil hats but it's absolutely not like that. Linux is just one of three options that happens to be FOSS where the other two aren't (being FOSS is a good thing, not bad). Boggles my mind that it's even an argument for some people. 

'Hey Serif, stop working on the iOS version of Affinity because most people don't even use it and it's wasting resources that could be put toward the OS I use!' 

Ugh. I quite literally only use Windows because of the Affinity suite and Capture One. I made the mistake of upgrading to Windows 11, and now I can't use the suite. 😢
I would greatly welcome Linux versions. Would gladly pay for them again.

I think it would be really helpful here if many of us Linux users took part in these beta trials for Photoshop and Illustrator to help to ensure that the online web-based versions of these two softwares worked well with different Linux distributions and to provide bug reports so that issues could be fixed before the final online products are launched.

I was considering it. Problem is, for the time being at least, you have to have a desktop version of PS or Illustrator to create new files.

No, I just don't like seeing people in this forum going into other peoples requests threads and basically saying they don't want said request to come to fruition because it doesn't affect them directly. Like I said, I don't go round complaining that Serif are so focused on the Mac version of the software when I don't use a mac, why would someone else complain about a linux version just because they don't use linux? It makes no sense to come into this topic with negativity toward the request. I'd go as far as to say it's pretty spiteful and selfish. "I don't edit raw images, why are serif wasting their time on improving that feature when I don't even need it!" 

You could go as far as to say there's only one major desktop OS, windows. because thats where pretty much every is, right? Who cares about having a mac version, right? Heck why are Serif wasting their time on affinity at all? everyone should just use photoshop, because thats what the majority of people use. Who needs options, right?

This is true for now, however it is a growing market with currently no major competing products and if Serif gets in there early, they're going to be *the* suite of choice for photo editing and design work. Sure you have gimp, krita and inkscape, but gimp is like a special needs little brother of photoshop and krita is mostly for painting... and Inkscape is not the most intuitive software to use. The affinity suite blows these away. Photoshop is nowhere to be seen in this marketplace as well so Serif will pretty much get the only share of profits there and make no mistake, more and more people are choosing Linux as their desktop OS. It is a growing market for sure. I think the problem is that normal people who aren't in the know still think of Linux as the 'programmers and hackers OS' which sounds scary and complicated, but it's actually just a regular OS people can use just fine. Linux as a desktop gaming PC solution has the full support of major companies like Valve.

Anyways I think this time next year we will see a huge growth for Linux. the hundreds of distros aside, developing for linux in general means distro can use it (kinda, please serif do not go the route Adobe did with substance designer on linux lol).

Well everyone is entitled to their opinions no matter how wrong. Windows, Mac and Linux are the three major OS's. Linux might be dominant in other areas, like how pretty much the majority of phones, supercomputers and servers are running linux, and in that sense sure you can say "it's not a major desktop OS" in that most people use Windows and the rest of the share goes to Mac then finally Linux... But it's still one of the three major OS's and it runs faster and more secure than windows. Literally the only reason the vast majority use Windows over Linux is;

1) basically all computers that aren't mac come with windows preinstalled and most people aren't bothered about changing their OS
2) most software runs on windows because developers make software for windows, because thats where the majority of users are (which is also partly the reason people stick to windows, it's really unhealthy relationship. Devs dont make software for linux because not many use linux because devs don't make software for linux, which is a stupid cycle)

There is nothing Linux can't do that windows can in theory. People *should* be using the fastest, most secure OS (linux), but people just use what they're handed to them which is windows most of the time. Thankfully this is starting to change. Steamdeck and all steam machines run linux, there are a few brands of pc that come preinstalled with linux most notably System76, which is kind of the apple of the linux world https://system76.com/desktops

So yea, just because you don't use linux doesn't mean it's not in the running. It *is* used by a lot of people, creatives and developers mostly at the moment, gamers secondly and slowly but surely, every day, non-tech-savvy people. Take a look at POP OS. it comes installed of the system76 computers and it's extremely user friendly, so much so that I'd actually set up my grandma a POP_OS pc than a windows pc. It's far more user friendly than windows, far more secure than windows, far *faster* than windows, can do all the normal, every day things people need just like windows can, but without the telemetry and bloatware. The only thing holding Linux back in this case is that developers for niche stuff like what we do need to start developing software for us to use on linux.

Anyway, your comment doesn't help anyone. If you don't use Linux and you don't have a need for affinity photo on linux fine, just don't make anti-comments. I don't use Mac OS but I'm not going to sit here and complain that Serif are wasting time on the Mac version of the software even though like 90% of people use windows. Linux support is being requested because people want it.