Bez Bezson

But on the other hand, the percentage of the linux users interested in professional software like Affinity products, is for sure much higher than of the windows users, as most windows users use their pc to write a letter and surf the internet.
Much more linux users by percentage of all linux users are on a more professional level on using computers and have a need for more software in all directions.
Even more mac users by percentage of all mac users are especially (originally) more on a design level and working with photo editing, design and so on.

But as @Michael Tunnell told already, the facts we can only get by doing focused research and actions on this topic. So i don't like to talk about what could be ... but to talk about, what we can do right now.

Yea as I said a few weeks a go- if a designer sends me an illustrator file (or pretty much anything else besides image files), what do I do?  I'm left with terrible options, nothing of the "native" set is any good.  And it's not just reading the file, I can't edit it as well to send it back. And that's a 30% market share).  That's why using "3%" is a terribly unfair number. 

At the very least, it'll help grab the Wine dev's attention. Whether they do anything about it or not is up in the air.

i work on linux mint latest version.
If tomorow i can work with affinity product i take licence tomorrow.
We have figma for ux ui  but no realy good tool like photoshop or illustrator. krita or gimp doesn't have a good workflow.
You have a realy good oprtunity with linux user  in professionnal teams. we have big pc with nvidia card : my linux conf : gpu 12 cores, 48GO ram, rtx 3080. Today i have a subscription on adobe, and yuouir product are very good, why don't you go on linux market ?
i 'm ux ui Professional and web developper. i'm working for development only with linux and docker container, and always need to switch on windows to work for design.
Hope we can have a good solution soon .... and always stay on linux.

That statement does not seem true to me and certainly not fair to Serif.  It's perfectly reasonable for them to be extremely cautious in their decision-making with regard to possibly developing for another platform and then having to support it.  It would also be perfectly reasonable for them to say they won't make a Linux version because they simply don't want to.  That's their prerogative.   All we can do is continue to make it known that we want it and are willing to pay for it.

We should continue to make it known that we want it for as long as we still want it.  It requires almost no effort to re-iterate our desire ad-infinitum.  The rest is out of our hands and no amount of bitching, whining or insulting comments from anybody in this forum will change that.  You're obviously tired of waiting, and that's ok.  It's understandable.  Perhaps you should move on, then.  In fact, please do.  Unless you can contribute something of any usefulness to the discussion without being so belligerent all the time, it might be better if you unsubscribe from this thread.

All I know is that Linux does almost everything I want it to do, but if I had my Affinity apps in among these windows, I'd be tickled freaking pink.
You can do it, Mr. Ingram. You can convince your coworkers to make my computer life complete.
 
 

If that's the case then we have our answer. They refuse to let us prove it and thus they refuse to even consider it.
If that's how they look at it then it seems they do not care if there is enough people to sustain it or not, they just don't want to do it at all because the only thing they are willing to consider is stuff that will skew it in such a way to justify it to themselves to not do it.
If they genuinely wanted to know then they would allow us the chance to genuinely prove it but instead they want to put on tasks that will take a very long time to build momentum on the hope it will be enough. This is like a older sibling giving a video game controller to their younger sibling that isn't plugged in to trick them into thinking they are doing something while you know it accomplishes nothing.
Quick note to Serif: the argument of "we're better than crowdfunded software" is an excuse and bad one, because a lot of people have used crowdfunding as a way to gather interest and backing to become a massive success. Font Awesome for example did crowdfunding to find out if enough people would back it to justify extra work and when they did it we proved that we wanted them to and thus it was successful and it got even better. (for reference:  Font Awesome on Kickstarter = 35,550 backers. They only asked for a $30,000 goal and the total raised was $1,076,960 . . . for a icon set! They gave us the chance to prove we were willing to pay and we did.

It has nothing to do with being finicky.  Anything we install for our users, we then have to SUPPORT.  If we have trouble with the software, how much help can we expect to receive from Affinity when we tell them that we're running it in Wine on Linux?  My experience tells me that most companies would reply with something like "sorry, we don't support running it that way.  Please run it on Windows."
We pay for software because we want the official support that comes along with it.  The official support is valuable to us.

One last quote: This made me think of that Hiri commercial email client.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/linux-users-are-more-valuable-customers

I'm one of those people who's willing to pay more a Linux version and buy enough copies for everyone at a small VFX studio.  However, I would not buy any if it means I have to run it under Wine.  I'd pay only only for a proper Linux version for these users.
It would be a mistake to count "wine users" as a good metric to go by in order to determine market potential.  There are many more of us who would not be represented in those numbers.

There are certain places you can check to see if your Windows program is running on WINE. Perhaps there are more modern methods.
ntdll.dll:wine_get_version HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wine I have no idea how simple/complex the WINE problem is, so I don't know if we can expect WINE to work soon or never. But if you can build some checks now, they will already be there once WINE starts to work with Affinity products.

Yeah I'd definitely be interested in seeing how many users we had via WINE!

a) Ok sure gimp causes a reduced market size.... for photo editing.  But the other parts of your suite have like  terrible-to-zero competition. Illustrator being the first example, but that's only one.

b) "people outright reject the concept of paid software on Linux"? Really? Do you have any idea how many  server technologies run on linux that are commercial; not FOSS? I've said this before here- this is a chicken-and-egg scenario:  The reason you're (missing the big opportunity by)  not supporting linux makes people less likely to run linux, thus reducing the market size. 

Fair enough. That's why we hope to get the WINE support. I would recommend a WINE check in your software though, so you can gather telemetry on how many users run your Windows version on Linux. You'll get an insight for free. You may notice that there aren't enough Linux users and your suspicions were right. You may even want to share the percentages after a year or two, to stop this discussion with some statistics as opposed to suspicions from both sides.

Cool be sure to point out that it's really to get other affinity products too because they're all just going to say "nah we've got gimp." So we need to explain that doing so would help support the base of the platform. 
Also obviously point out the three checkbox thing. gl

@m.vlad, that's an excellent idea and please feel free to proceed with it! ☺️

Where are all the people on this forum? 140 votes is only like 47 people. With the size of the Linux threads I assumed that this would have happened in a day. Guess they are probably not active in the community here.

I was thinking of making a post today on a few subreddits.

It turns out that everyone has been really amazing and Affinity Photo is now at position 13 within the top 20 with 131 votes. By continuing to encourage our contacts to use their three votes for this app, I think we can realistically get Affinity Photo into the top ten.
Well done everyone!!

@Renzatic, thank you for sharing that excellent news and we must also redouble our efforts to encourage our Linux friends and colleagues to vote too!

I am now pleased to report that our combined efforts so far have put Affinity Photo at position 18 within the top 20 and that is good news.
We can still do more though. We can let our Linux friends and colleagues know by social media, messaging services and email that we would very much like them to help out by registering with Wine, going here https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=39311 and then voting for this app by ticking all three boxes then that would be a very great help.
 

@everybody Please vote!

There are now enough votes to put Photo in the top 25!
Dunno if we'll beat Final Fantasy XI, but with a bit of effort, we could top Photoshop.

Because that's precisely what WINE is all about.