Vex

Yes, and SWM is totally what made the feature usable and mainstream enough for the big guys (Mac and Windows) to adopt it! 🙄

We're talking about a comprehensive desktop operating system here, and you know it. Your intellectual dishonesty is stubborn, I'll give you that.

I know you need to believe your narrative, and it doesn't matter what evidence anyone offers. You will insist you're right, and that you're the expert. But I think we've all gotten the message loud and clear. Nobody has been an arrogant ass about Linux in here but you. Nobody has acted as though the world revolves around them but you. It's just too bad you have some sort of compulsion to inject yourself into a discussion about which you have nothing useful to contribute.

Desktop compositing didn't exit in Mac or PC before Linux. Neither did virtual desktops. You asked for features. These are two features which have become central to modern desktop OSes. If you don't like the examples given, that's on you.

ARM is an architecture, not a specific brand, OEM, or product. lmao you're so full of it it's funny

And your claims aren't based on a good understanding of the industry. You're welcome to your opinions, but that doesn't make you objectively right, and you're continuing to insist you're authoritative on this. Again, unless you work for Affinity and have insider info, you're not the authority. Market research regarding the platforms devs are targeting tell a different story. No, you don't. You speak about software engineering as someone who doesn't have any professional (or even hobbyist) experience. "Despite its faults, people manage to write stuff for Linux" is a pretty bad take, and suggests you have no idea what it takes to write desktop software. According to you. But you aren't the expert. You aren't the decision-maker. You're just someone on a forum who is "entertained" by making himself the center of attention. "Nvidia doesn't care about Linux" was your claim. Except Nvidia has the crypto market captive, and a lot of miners use Linux. You need drivers for your GPU to use it for mining. Ergo, you are wrong about Nvidia not caring about Linux. They do, as evidenced by their investment into support for the same. If they didn't care, and you were the authority on this, they wouldn't do that. Whoops.

A LOT of things YOU take for granted on Mac and PC started in Linux, many moons ago. Not everyone chooses an OS based on whether or not it has the latest greatest gimmick.

But your entire role in this thread has been to derail it, insisting that there's no legitimate reason to even entertain a discussion about Affinity on Linux. That's dumb. Unless you have special insider information from Affinity on the subject, you're not actually contributing anything to the discussion; you're just posting so people have to pay attention to you. Yes, and your understanding of that market, I'm guessing, is based on news articles and public data that doesn't actually deep-dive into industry research. I've done that second part. And I'm telling you your entire premise is flawed. This alone shows how little you actually know or understand about Linux, and I'm betting you've also never actually written desktop software. You don't actually know what you're talking about on this one. That wasn't my point though, was it? Why don't you re-read what I wrote and use context clues to understand why I mentioned this. Is that what I said? You've come to a thread where people are discussing the merits and potential of Affinity on Linux, and your only contribution to this thread can be summed up as "shut up, nobody cares." Rude. Hahahahahahahahahahaha you are totally full of it, and this is enough evidence for me. Linux is a VERY popular operating system for crypto miners, and Nvidia's GPUs have been held captive by the crypto market for several years now. Nvidia also continues to release - and support - a solid Linux driver, and they have contributed to Valve's efforts to make Steam cross-platform. I know you really want to be the expert here, but you're not.

The Affinity suite appears to use Qt, which is already a huge plus for portability. Hubs poked around a bit at trying to get one of the apps to run on his main desktop, but there's something in one of the core Affinity libraries that's a problem, and that's as far as we can get.

@LondonSquirrel so this thread is clearly just going in circles between you...and everyone else. Why are you so aggressively opposed to Linux? Have you done extensive market research that has led you to the conclusion that there is no legitimate reason for Affinity (or any other software publisher, for that matter) to ever even discuss Linux support? Are you a software developer? Do you understand how software is written, and what technologies, platforms, and products exist to assist publishers with creating cross-platform software? Do you have insider knowledge on the specific technological reasons why Affinity has decided it's not worth the engineering effort to work on Linux compatibility? Can you provide *any* credible data to back up your claims? There are billions of people in the world, and even more computers. As I mentioned earlier, I did have access to market research data when I worked at Microsoft because of the nature of my job, and I can tell you conclusively that Linux is growing in popularity, not the other way around. Lots of professionals use Linux for a wide variety of tasks. Something else I think maybe you're missing here is how businesses use desktop computers in 2021. Thanks to cloud services, even small businesses and sole proprietorships can do everything (or almost everything) in a web browser. Everything is in the cloud, and everything has a web-based frontend. That makes it even easier for businesses to move away from Windows or MacOS. That doesn't mean there are no desktop applications (if that were true this conversation would be moot), but it does mean that your insistence that Linux's app catalog is all the evidence you need that professionals don't use Linux is likely based more in anecdotal evidence than anything concrete. I mean, if you hate Linux, more power to you, but maybe don't poo in our sandbox over it?

Big disagree with you on this one. I used to work at Microsoft in the dev world, and if your logic actually worked in reality, the company wouldn't have seen a significant increase in Linux users when they decided to open-source a bunch of stuff and start actively working to better support Linux. Linux is still used for a LOT of stuff, especially in the creative world. While it is not the typical OS one assumes will be used by someone interested in raster or vector graphics, or desktop publishing, that doesn't mean it's irrelevant or its use is negligible. Linux has a much broader user base than it did even five years ago, and more and more people have "defected" to it in recent years due to a general disenchantment with tech corporations on the part of consumers. It could even be a nontrivial selling point for Affinity's apps to be Linux-compatible, or to work with WINE or Valve's own WINE implementation. When you're still trying to edge into a market that is completely dominated by a monolithic software juggernaut, it's not unreasonable to consider alternative platforms for popularizing your software - Linux included. Now, I have no idea what the devs have encountered in the past with poking at getting Affinity to work on Linux. It may be that there's just nobody at the company with the right tool set and knowledge to make it work, and there's no justification to make a budget and find someone who can. That doesn't mean it'd be a pointless exercise, and it doesn't mean Linux is irrelevant. And, ultimately, it seems like a feedback forum for a product is about providing feedback, not trying to trivialize and discredit feedback that is pretty clearly of interest to multiple users, given how old and expansive this thread is. Adobe's apps are probably the single biggest thing keeping me on Windows now. Just about everything else I use on a daily basis is available on Linux now, and if Affinity's apps were on Linux, making the switch could actually be possible for me.

Nope. If I open the PSD to edit within Publisher (i.e. not with Photoshop), there's no indication these lines exist. Some of the image layers do have transparency, if that matters.

I am working on a project to convert a whole bunch of PSDs to an ebook, and I'm using Publisher and the data merge feature to create Publisher documents for each chapter of the book using the PSDs, which I then export to PDF with no image compression or rasterization. Some images in the master PSDs are showing up in PDF readers with a transient gray outline that sometimes moves or disappears depending on how far you zoom in when viewing the PDF. The lines aren't printing, so I don't think they're actually part of the document, but I'm seeing them in multiple PDF viewers.

No, I'm not suggesting there's any indication they'd do this. I'm just suggesting that as the "underdog" in the industry (anyone who isn't Adobe and maybe Corel), introducing a new standard could be a big deal for Affinity. We need a standard - that much I think is objective fact. The inability to transfer portable digital masters from one platform to another is ridiculous, in that there's no good technological reason for it. Whomever hits the finish line first on some kind of actual standard will have far more influence over its development and evolution, and I think it's inevitable that there will be a standard at some point.

Vectors have a few standardized formats now (SVG and EPS) that preserve most, if not all, fidelity. Affinity might find itself in a good position to promote new standard formats...

Just curious - why not PDF? I ask because PDF export preserves text fidelity.

Thanks, I will do that in the future. In my own forum experience it's usually bad etiquette to necro multi-years-old threads, especially taking into account changes between software versions in that same span of time.

Because the home user is willing to give them money if the price is right, and there's precious little reason to not offer an affordable option. To be super clear here: I really am impressed so far with Affinity's products. The use of Qt instead of native UI chrome is sort of a hindrance (AFAIK AppleScript can't interact with the UI very much), but it definitely gives Adobe's apps a run for their money for a lot of stuff (not everything...I'm still learning). Optimally, there should be competition rather than monolithic platforms that keep you closely tied to a single company's ecosystem in perpetuity. Standard formats are awesome and make things exchangeable between platforms. In the vector world, SVG and EPS are both good alternatives that allow you preserve most fidelity and maintain portability between apps and platforms. There isn't a similar format for desktop publishing software like InDesign and Publisher. That's probably been one of the biggest hindrances. Honestly, a format that builds on EPUB might make the most sense - something that uses HTML and CSS on the backend (which makes it absurdly easy to script an entire layout in your chosen language), but adds more special sauce to do page layouts and physical units (i.e. mm and inch). Pack all that up into an archive format (which what EPUB does), and you've got yourself a portable layout/publishing format. Obviously Adobe wants you to use their formats, but they've been forced by the industry to support a wide variety of portable/standardized vector formats, because those formats already exist. If the same were to be possible with Photoshop/APhoto and InDesign/APub, portability between Adobe and Affinity might be more feasible.

"These are pro apps" seems to be Adobe's business model. It's silly, because anyone who takes a college-level or post-secondary class in graphic design (of any kind) is going to be taught Adobe's apps, which means they have become the de facto hobbyist/prosumer platform. Rather than embrace that, as other publishers have, they've stubbornly refused to offer any real options for people who don't have business expense accounts or the ability to write off the subscription as a business expense. (I say "real," because their Elements line is nowhere near the functionality of CC.) The Affinity suite is definitely a much better option for prosumers, but is still sort of expensive for hobbyists (at full price; the current 50% off pricing I think is affordable for just about everyone). There is a general growing dissatisfaction with corporate tech. Whether or not that will extend to Adobe in the long term remains to be seen. Like Microsoft, their software bread and butter is in the enterprise, government, and education markets - all well-known to take a long time to adopt new platforms and technologies. VirtualBox and any other virtualization software can slow down your machine simply because of how much overhead is required to run a complete second operating system on top of your host OS. Modern computers make this a lot easier - both Intel and AMD offer hardware virtualization capabilities which make VMs much faster and more efficient than ever. WINE (and Proton, which is built on WINE) aren't emulators, though. WINE is essentially a shim layer between all the libraries (DLLs) and resources in Windows, and the application you're trying to run. There are certain Windows APIs that can't be shimmed for whatever reason, so if Affinity's apps use any of those exclusive APIs, compatibility with WINE might be more difficult.

I appreciate the suggestion, but that doesn't work well when there are so many different tool panels. I did notice the collapsing feature, but that's still not great on a low-resolution display. Collapsible toolbars on the sides of the window would be super awesome.

I found some 4+ years old threads on this, but nothing newer... I am trying to switch from Adobe to Affinity across all three apps. One big feature missing from Affinity is the ability to collapse tool panels. This is less and less of an issue thanks to high-resolution displays, but one of my laptops is an old MacBook Pro with a 1280x800 display, and Affinity's panels take up a huge amount of screen real estate: I know I can hide all the panels with the tab key, but I don't want that...I just want to make the tool panels smaller when I'm not actively using them.

Agreed on all counts. Adobe is prohibitively expensive for hobbyists, prosumers, and people looking to make a little side income. Average, non-tech people are becoming increasingly disenchanted with expensive products published by big tech companies. I decided to buy the Affinity suite for PC (haven't decided if I also need the Mac version since I use both platforms) because it seems like the first viable alternative to the Adobe ecosystem. If I'm not mistaken, the UI uses Qt, so I am a little curious as to what components would have to be completely re-engineered.

Just going to throw this out there - apps that are published through Steam can make use of Valve's own Proton layer, which makes it possible to access DirectX and other APIs that are otherwise unavailable in WINE. It's kind of like how GOG figured out how to package DOSBox with old computer games, preconfigured to work with each specific game. AFAIK Valve does work directly with publishers whose software is popular enough for them to invest their resources in the compatibility layer. My husband tried running Publisher last night in WINE on Arch Linux, including running it through Proton, and ran into a failure from one of Affinity's internal libraries. Obviously there's more to making an application work through Proton (or WINE), but releasing through Steam might be a route for both Linux compatibility (which it doesn't sound like the company cares too much about, after skimming this thread), and expanding Affinity's market reach (which maybe they do care about) through publishing and advertising on Steam. There are a lot of video game tools on Steam, and I think Affinity's apps would appeal to a lot of video game designers and artists out there who spend their time and money on the Steam store.

Thanks for the additional info! I had found the "Add pages from file" feature, but of course having to do each page individually wasn't going to work for me. It has taken a lot of tweaking the process, but I've figured out a reliable route by using Publisher to process all the PSD page data into a single document, then exporting to PDF, which gets me the real text data I need.

Fair enough, thanks for clarfiying. That said, to any Serif people reading this: it would be so freaking useful if I could batch insert a bunch of PSDs with their layers as part of the Publisher document (not embedded/linked). As it is, Publisher's been able to get me a lot further than anything else, which is awesome. :)