Bog

All I gotta say is look at my response above, it covers what you're repeating. I explained the logic that if they make bad decisions they're not good at this so shouldn't be recommended, and explained the lack of emotion. I don't know how else to help you here.

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. 

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. 

No, I could not disagree with this more; we have opposite opinions.  (Well obviously I agree  that we shouldn't take it personally.) No, it's not our job to convince them. That's over with; done.  "A minute or two"? hahaha, this is page 41. This thread started 7 years ago.  They still have the attitude that they have, like, "the golden prize" and we're supposed to be clamoring for it (which sadly we (well most of the rest of you)), are.  No no no, we're the gold.   It's 7 years and they still don't get it.  They're Adobe all over again.  Give up, we don't serve them, let them fail for their ignorance. 
 

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.

I can back that up; they're metaphorically like "religious fanatics".  That's the best metaphor- it's as incorrect to point to them as representing the overall attitude as it is to point to the  KKK as representing right wing politics.  

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.

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

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

Woo!  We have to explain to people about clicking the three checkboxes when they vote, I don't think most people realize that...  
This is fun, I fell like we're pulling a short sell on wine like reddit did to the hedge funds with gamespot stock haha.  

Woo!  We have to explain to people about clicking the three checkboxes when they vote, I don't think most people realize that...  
This is fun, I fell like we're pulling a short sell on wine like reddit did to the hedge funds with gamespot stock haha.  

Yea we (well yall) should probably also go to the winehq forum and post about our existence.  I mean literally the only apps I miss since having switched to linux are illustrator and premiere.  (The only reason I need to run a virtualbox is for them.)  I'd post it myself except obviously I'm the cynical naysayer here lol.  If you guys do, don't "flood"! haha, trickle in a few at a time right.  gl. 

Yea we (well yall) should probably also go to the winehq forum and post about our existence.  I mean literally the only apps I miss since having switched to linux are illustrator and premiere.  (The only reason I need to run a virtualbox is for them.)  I'd post it myself except obviously I'm the cynical naysayer here lol.  If you guys do, don't "flood"! haha, trickle in a few at a time right.  gl. 

Yea actually I already did, dude, scroll up.  👍
 

I agree with what a lot of you are saying- Serif (mistakenly) doesn't understand the opportunity here, so I think this is futile. As exemplified by @Mark Ingram recently using the idea that the number of people here talking about a linux version is a metric. That's an absurd lame "metric".  It's a circular argument: 
In essence it goes like this: "Why should we approach the linux community, obviously they don't want it because we haven't heard very  much from them."  That makes no sense; for example I had never even heard of Affinity until like 3 months ago.  ..... because I run linux.  See the circle there? "The reason aliens don't exist in the universe is that I haven't seen one."
"The reason we don't support linux is that there's no demand." 
Should instead be stated:
"The reason there's no demand is that we don't support linux." 
They have this attitude that they're the gold and we're supposed to be bending over backwards to get it. No, they' don't understand, *WE* are where the gold is; a wide-open hungry market.  They should be bending over backwards for us, not the other way around.  We shouldn't need this whole plan of getting votes for wine support, they should have some of their devs in their making it happen, regardless of whatever votes there. 
I say we should just give up. They don't get it.

I agree with what a lot of you are saying- Serif (mistakenly) doesn't understand the opportunity here, so I think this is futile. As exemplified by @Mark Ingram recently using the idea that the number of people here talking about a linux version is a metric. That's an absurd lame "metric".  It's a circular argument: 
In essence it goes like this: "Why should we approach the linux community, obviously they don't want it because we haven't heard very  much from them."  That makes no sense; for example I had never even heard of Affinity until like 3 months ago.  ..... because I run linux.  See the circle there? "The reason aliens don't exist in the universe is that I haven't seen one."
"The reason we don't support linux is that there's no demand." 
Should instead be stated:
"The reason there's no demand is that we don't support linux." 
They have this attitude that they're the gold and we're supposed to be bending over backwards to get it. No, they' don't understand, *WE* are where the gold is; a wide-open hungry market.  They should be bending over backwards for us, not the other way around.  We shouldn't need this whole plan of getting votes for wine support, they should have some of their devs in their making it happen, regardless of whatever votes there. 
I say we should just give up. They don't get it.

Me too voted just now.  I really just want an illustrator alternative. Does anyone know where to get old illustrator versions? This seems to indicate it only goes as far back as CS6:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator/install-older-version-of-illustrator/m-p/10360849
I'd totally settle for Illustator 8 from 1998 if I could find it somewhere! I bet that's pretty much impossible...
Btw one foreseeable drawback to this plan of voting for Photo even though we want Designer is that others who aren't tuned in to our strategy  will look at that and just go "I'm good with gimp, why bother with this?" 
 

I agree with most of that except well what do think of this; as I posted above- it's not as simple as just taking 3% and within that applying the same percentage reduction of potential users to it as mac or windows; there's three things that make the linux platform unique:
They'd be in a new market that's starving for products like theirs (and no, not just photoshop).
A big bonus besides the sales there is that they'd also get first mover advantage.  
Linux users are largely developers, or least relative to the developer populating of win and mac. We're not running linux just do mundane things like email and web like the majority of w&m users are.
It feels like when it comes to a native version answers like yours are doing an apples to oranges comparison, which is missing out on important factors. 

Although yea I agree starting with an emulator (well in the case of Wine it's not an emulator haha) is correct.  

Exactly; they're myopic, completely ignoring all of us in spite of the fact that it's a whopping 35 pages and we're making legitimate well-articulated arguments about how profitable it would be for them given that it's 2021 and Adobe still doesn't support it and probably never will.  They're in such a good market position.  I'm not buying any serif products and I'm telling windows or mac users to avoid them because they're not being intelligent. 

Yea obviously and the entire 35 page is about why they should be, but apparently based on what he said they're "open" to it but only "if approached"? Why "if approached"? 
Extending the metaphor: If they hypothetically didn't support macos and then gave in, would they say "ok well we'll support it if Apple approaches us"? 
 

I agree with most of that except well what do think of this; as I posted above- it's not as simple as just taking 3% and within that applying the same percentage reduction of potential users to it as mac or windows; there's three things that make the linux platform unique:
They'd be in a new market that's starving for products like theirs (and no, not just photoshop).
A big bonus besides the sales there is that they'd also get first mover advantage.  
Linux users are largely developers, or least relative to the developer populating of win and mac. We're not running linux just do mundane things like email and web like the majority of w&m users are.
It feels like when it comes to a native version answers like yours are doing an apples to oranges comparison, which is missing out on important factors. 

Although yea I agree starting with an emulator (well in the case of Wine it's not an emulator haha) is correct.  

Uhm, sure, but they need to get this app working with a multitude of apps. Wanting them to make the first contact is a bit presumptuous. They don't get anything from this, since wine is a free project, whereas you have everything to win.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=39311&sAllBugs

Yes, exactly, and that's where differ. Glad we nailed that down. 
 
Well, obvious question: Why isn't it the other way around, why wouldn't you being the one reaching out to Wine?  You'd be making more sales.  I mean, should they be catering to you or the other way around? 

But how about putting some small developer resources in figuring out why Wine stops working? You could use the telemetry to see how many people are running on Wine.
Copied from other thread:
 

I know you're being very generous with the numbers, but only counting the number of people who a) use the affinity forums and b) have participated in this thread (most reddit users are lurkers, as a point of reference.) is a bit skewed. Not only that, but it's possible more people would consider linux as a switchable OS if it had this software on it.
Also, people here aren't asking for new apps built from the ground up, they want the current apps to work, either via a native port or by working with Wine and getting the issues that make it not work ironed out. This is a way smaller endeavour than a re-write of 3 apps, especially since in the marketing materials I remember serif boasting about how all apps use the same *platformless* base. It's not word for word what I remember reading, but surely modifying that base is all that's needed, right? At worst you could switch the efficient calls that have no WINE parity to less efficient ones for the port, until they get added to WINE.