deeds

is this about governments waiving public & private liabilities of therapeutic products for themselves and pharmaceutical companies?

Interesting that you think the relative lack of creative users willing to pay for creative software, on Linux, is a negative thing. How do you plan to address this in a way that would provide both sufficient recompense and incentive for a company like Affinity to spend the millions of dollars in man hours (and even more in opportunity cost) to convert their software to the many fragmented versions of Linux?

Linux users could start a poll, somewhere out in the wider web, to reveal how many of them are willing to pay for software, and which specific software, too. That's about the only way they're going to convince anyone not otherwise religiously devoted to its anachronisms to support it through self funded, risky endeavour at their own opportunity cost. I always get the feeling that Linux users are less likely to want to pay for software things than even Windows users. Which is really saying something. And this kind of polling might reveal that to be true, and that creative software is quite low on the average Linux user's wish lists for things they'd pay for, which might also be the reason this kind of polling isn't done. But that's all conjecture. Remind me, how does Blender make a profit?

Subtract and Add have been seriously bugged since the addition of the non-destructive feature... for destructive work and non-destructive operation. Which is way back in the 1.x days. There are a myriad of issues with these operations... but this definitely looks like a new one. So maybe this'll force them to look into the problems with the algorithms. Whilst non-destructive editing of shape merging is a huge boon, it's gotta work reliably to be creatively dependable. Sadly, it's still possible to make two rectangles, rotate one of them 90 degrees, add them, then apply a cornering to the inner vertices, and watch one of the outer vertices crimp. This is a very old bug, indicative of the source of the winding issues with vertices. eg:

Feel like this makes the case for a redesign, too... Pencil, Shutter, Page Curl... seems like the obvious thing it should be. Not sure what the four bands signify.

The lack of effort going into making the programs more enjoyable to use seems strange, to say the least.

To all those who've worked so hard, tirelessly (and without reward) to defend the image, identity and sanctity of Affinity, you deserve a well earned break. A moment to self reflect. To raise a glass to your selves. To cheer a secular version of Christmas, to the gods of whatever makes the jets go round the world. Well done.

https://www.google.com/search?q="auto-blend"+photoshop

untrue and incorrect. The misnomer of "Separated Mode" is the error. Floating Panels are an important and foundational aspect of good creative apps, still... if developers choose... which they definitely should for something like image based works. And is quite easy to work with, thanks to a single property being able to be set to "float" a NSPanel (NextStep Panel). From Apple's own docs on 'isFloatingPanel', a boolean, you can easily see that most Panels in Affinity are exactly as described, therefore suitable to floating in "Separated Mode": https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/components/presentation/panels/

The JetBrains Youtrack facility is probably the ideal next level product for community engagement with regards how to and what to do next. It scales nearly infinitely, such that they open up their inhouse Youtrack systems for their own software to all their users, for all their products. https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/features/

A straw man, misdirection, passive aggression and insult. Did I miss anything?

This would only matter if they were significantly using Metal and OpenCL. There's no indication they are significantly using these APIs and the GPU hardware. These benchmarks indicate most everything is being done on the CPU, and only one or two cores, at that. If you doubt that, examine the processes whilst doing some real world work with these apps, and you'll see the situation quite clearly. Open Xcode if you want to examine how little these apps use the GPU on Macs.

Are you happy with the performance of your apps on PC Workstations and the new M1/M2 Macs? Why do these apps appear to only use a modicum of a GPU's potential and (at most) two cores of a CPU? What is being done to improve the scaling of performance of the apps on higher end hardware (many cored CPUs and high end GPUs) Has the supposed rewrite of the apps been done with a view to multithreading such that you can saturate any number of CPU cores and more fully utilise modern GPU power and performance?

100% Agreed! There's another (implicit) benefit of PDF Manuals... providing one forces the software maker to think about and articulate their product's features in a linear and complete manner. This, quite surely, benefits everyone; including the software maker, as it will more easily reveal workflow problems and excess user interactions for any and all operations.

Look at the UI within both version 1 and 2 of the Affinity Suite. Do you really think Affinity understands the needs and desires of UI designers for pixel level consideration? If you want to do pixel level considerate UI design; it's Sketch or Photoshop, or PhotoPaint if you're adventurous. Or an old copy of Fireworks.

Anyone wanna try explaining the conversion process from vector TO bitmap? That's what Little Owl needs.

Pixel alignment won't help much, as the curves aren't specific to pixels in the leaves. The best "solution" to this problem is resampling, which adds exaggerations to the curves such that eyes see less of the immediate pixelation and focus more on the edges as a function of shape. This an old trick... export the image at much larger size than desired, then in an image editor with good resampling (the other brands) you shrink it back to the size you actually want, and get results like below, where the 500x500 from Affinity is on the left, and the resampled from 4000x4000 down to 500x500 is done in a rival you probably know the name of. Zoomed in like this, you can see the exaggerations that help the eye see things as sharper and more distinct, that come about as a result of this resampling:

I don't think they're nearly as fast and performant on new Macs as they could/should be. Just the advantages of the proximity and integration of CPU<->GPU benefit of m1 and m2 showing up, not the usage of all cores, nor full usage of the GPU. Take out those architecture advantages of the m1/m2 and Mac version's aren't significantly more performant. Affinity was never fast, except for light vector work, I thought/felt for the longest time. The only seeming advantage of v2 is that light vector work performance now extends to medium complexity vector works. Start adding effects and things go even slower than before, it seems.

Another tacky way to solve this: Copy a SUPER HUGE bitmap image to your clipboard from finder/explorer * it must be massive, at least 4096x4096, preferably double that. Paste it into your Affinity document. Save the file Delete the pasted massive image. Save the file... --- this triggers the flushing.

Ebola?

maybe juicier with some pseudio skeudio from Fill Kolourins:

Near as I can tell, the OP is disgruntled because the money spent was within the prior 6 months, yet they're not being offered an upgrade discount, consequently... wondering why is that? All the OP's subsequent responses to subsequent challenges to their disgruntlement (which fail to address the question) are compromised by the need to defend and justify a feeling... which nobody should ever need to do outside of professional counselling. Near as I can tell... none of us are likely qualified to provide an answer to a question about why, other than suppositions, guesses and speculations. I'll make one: I think Serif considers 3 months prior purchases to be the window of prior purchase sufficiently deserving of a free upgrade and enough time to prevent significant amounts of disgruntlement. and that they're willing to deal with the few that purchased in the 3 to 12 month window that might feel disgruntled to have missed out on a discounted (or free) upgrade offer. To the OP, I'm sorry you've had to experience this, and tend to agree. If I'd bought in the last 6 months, but further back than 3 months, ago, I'd be a little disgruntled, too. And I very nearly did rebuy during this window...

TL;DR there are good reasons to stay with 10.13.6 for creative endeavours, even on the newest hardware able to be "downgraded" to this version. This problem is not limited to the age of the Mac. There are very good reasons to remain on 10.13.6 (High Sierra) of MacOS that extend to all manner of other creative endeavours on a Mac. Games, Audio and Video Editing, Motion Graphics and code compilation all work faster and/or better on 10.13.6 compatible hardware than all subsequent versions of MacOS. This is (in part) due to the manner in which "security" is handled being a lighter touch in this particular version of MacOS (in all sorts of ways that impact performance negatively in latter versions), and this is connected to how coreaudiod behaves on these Macs in conjunction with the T1 and T2 chips (which significantly negatively impacts the consistency of the ways audio apps run, but also other issues abound because of the omnipresence of these approaches to security). But it's also because there's a massive difference in how fonts and windows are rendered in all subsequent versions of MacOS. This impacts both performance and the quality and sharpness of the rendering. All of these things are widely documented and addressed in all manner of ways throughout all kinds of creative forums and communities, and publicly available knowledge regarding the font rendering and window rendering switches published extensively by Apple themselves. For these reasons, things like Ableton Live are staying with a baseline compatibility of 10.13.6, to help their users remain fully capable within this "best of" MacOS versions before the big changes that weren't all good.

like this for the shortcuts...

Cheapest, easiest "fix" is an Export As: label, but as Francis has pointed out, there's many more aspects of all UI and UX that need (as a whole) holistic consideration of user experience, flow, objectives, contexts and intentions. In this case, the next "cheap fix" would be for export as types to be in a numerical list, where each number is the shortcut for that type, and focus to be on this as type choice upon first opening of the export dialog, so that the only entry needed by a regular user is to tap the number of the type they want, then tab to the next parameter they'd possibly like to change, or enter/return to do the export as is.