m.vlad

The better platform doesn't always win when competing with giants like Microsoft and Apple. They have licensing deals in place and paid promotion to the extent where alternatives cannot compete. But it did get a good office suite, and it's one of the reasons why linux is a valid alternative for productivity reasons to the others. It's also how chromebooks can be actually usable machines when all they are is a linux based OS with a browser, deep google integration and access to the google office suite alternative. Linux is a competent competitor in all fields except graphic design. 1. You know linux is also a GUI operating system right? I'm not even sure what you mean by this terminology - all operating systems have the back end, which is just code, and the front end - the GUI. All operating systems use this combination, there's no other way to do it. Linux can just be used without the later. That doesn't mean that people don't use GUIs however, and considering lately with Steam's proton opening a lot of people up to the option of using a linux OS as their main OS distros have been getting more popular. 2. I doubt big companies give two shits about the cost of windows licenses. It is most likely the performance benefit that lets them output stuff faster that is the deciding factor, not licenses. 3. That's just because the windows tools (can't speak for MacOS as I've only used it for a couple of hours) aren't good enough. it's more of a failure of windows than a success of linux. How does the previous statement negate this argument? You're arguing this will happen ad infinitum on the basis of it happening before, but chromebook's existence and popularity is proof enough that people didn't need MS Office specifically and they can do just fine with alternatives so they switched to a chromebook. Arguably every OS will have "ugly code". If you think something in the kernel code is truly bad you're free to suggest an improvement. Try doing that with Microsoft or Apple when you do find an issue. The statement was "of the OS available", not the best OS that will ever be. It's very much getting there. Distros like Deepin and Elementary OS are designed with the thought you'll be using their app store instead of running terminal commands (though you can do that just fine as well). Even Pop OS, one of the more popular distros at the moment, especially for gaming folk, has forked the Elementary OS app store. Also I'm not sure why grandmas are into graphic design, but go get them grandma!

Constraints are a web design feature however - or at the very least a responsive design one. Also, html/css export would be useful for feature parity with figma, another layout tool They're not made to deliver a final html product, but it could be a starting block.

For a publishing app that most likely needs the entire creative flow to use the same app at the moment, I would say interoperability between the two platforms is definitely the biggest flaw with Publisher at the moment.

I am surprised this hasn't been fixed yet. There is no room for working together with people using adobe if there is no common format that we can talk through. PDF is not a good enough alternative, as text gets split into text lines.

you could just have stuff using proprietary features that aren't part of the format be packaged, kind of like smart layers, and if you want to edit it you can either have your app approximate the results or rasterize it. So you have a standard carriage format with maybe 80% standardized features and 20% flavours from each software (For example, warping text in illustrator and saving in this format would mean in affinity you can either expand the warped text or rasterize it, since affinity doesn't support vector warp)

Does it preserve text lines? Last time I tried it as an in-between, the text lines were split into different layers. Anyway I think this is going a bit off topic. Also it doesn't work if someone is asking for psd files specifically.

That's why you standardize the file format, not the application itself, so that even cheaper software can touch on files like that. For now PSD is the format that is mostly used by everyone for anything when it comes to design (not including brochure design and the like, but even there there's the open format that adobe can export to and affinity can import). Although, sadly, affinity also falls into this pitfall, where the .af file format is not open at all outside the application itself, and PSD export still isn't good since text gets rasterized. but this is a talk for another time. There is IDML, which affinity can import (but not export to) which is more or less XML I think?

There's still the matter of having an entire copy of windows installed for a single app. But yes, it should be more feasible now that Nvidia allows GPU passthrough instead of having to mess with the driver or boot initialization stuff to have a working gpu passthrough setup.

Yes, which is why I said statcounter as a whole and not just linux' stats on statcounter. Plus I'd wager design people are slightly more tech literate on average than the average consumer, so the chances of designers using ad blockers are higher than non designer people, but I don't have any stats for this.

Statcounter isn't reliable since adblockers and agent spoofers are a thing. and even then, an overall market share does not denote the market share for a design app. They are on steam, that doesn't make them steam apps. That sounds like a problem with that specific app rather than with the ecosystem as a whole. I don't blame the entire windows os family for not being able to run a specific game or app.

There is no proof for or against the share of linux because there is no telemetry. as for your 2nd and 3rd arguments, do we need to refute them again? We've already given options for that - snap packages, appimages, etc. I don't see how packing in dependencies completely takes appimage off the table. sure it adds redundancies, but what about that makes it a no-go option? As far as Adobe's reasons go, you have no source, you can only make claims about what their reasoning was. I can also put words in their mouth "They didn't want to do it because they have a large library and they have more than enough profit margin from their current supported operating systems". that gets us nowhere, we're just arguing fantasies. Yes you can, that's the package manager. Or you can use a prepackaged solution such as appimages. Windows does that as well, you have developers packaging in dll libraries with apps instead of having the OS do that, you know why? because it works. I don't see you arguing against Microsoft for not taking control of the library dependency problem. I can only assume it's bias, and considering your tone and ignorance throughout these pages, I'm not sure anyone can argue with you, not because of a lack of valid points, but because you don't bring anything worthwhile to the table or actually are part of a conversation.

What is so shocking about a developer using a better solution than what they were using before? Do you think Linus makes the entire linux kernel code by himself with no outside contributions? He had a distribution issue with an app, so he used a feature that was built to solve that. I don't get how that's a bad argument

app images are compiled versions of apps, if you update the library on the base app you can compile app images off of that, where in the app image description does it say that you're not forking the entire app and libraries and you have to patch your own things to follow the base fork? That is absurd, and I don't see how windows does this any better?

I'm confused how you can stare right in the face of a solution to the "Different versions" argument and then claim there is no such solution. also, yes it is.

but then you have bloat in your system, libraries that are only needed for a few applications that might not be needed anymore but are packaged in because of reasons. Otherwise you already have dependency installations with most distros, where installing via the package manager will install the dependent libraries with a "dependency" tag that is then uninstalled together with the app when that is not needed anymore. Sure AppImage isn't the best, but it's one of many solutions and while it won't work for everything, it will work for a few small apps. To me this just sounds like moving the goalpost. "we can't port this app because there's too many distros" "look, this is a way to port the app to many distros without testing for each one" "we can't port this app because the solution you provided would include redundant code". the point isn't to give the perfect solution, the point is to have a solution to start from, together with snap packages and the other solutions. Piggybacking on what Redsandro said, if appimages are third party kludges, what is first party when it comes to linux? Where do you draw the line of first party and third party when it comes to an open source environment where everyone can contribute and fork and push changes and fixes and features?

Sadly they've already declined wanting to do a crowd funded campaign. They said that it doesn't align with their brand image or something like that, i.e: "we're better than crowfunded software". Well, not good enough to look into Linux compatability it seems. If only there was a way to get funds from a crowd of users with a low business risk...

Apparently some of the downvotes were because someone already posted about the thing the same day. These have quite a high number of upvotes and comments, I hope this proves that the FOSS-focused people do not represent the entirety of the linux userbase.

The biggest problem with linux is human individuality? That's an "issue" on all platforms.

You saw <10 people saying that they would rather fund FOSS software (fund, as in give money to free open source software) and that means that you won't make money? That's less people than here on this thread saying they'd pay for another license if it were ported. I honestly find it laughable that you'd rather argue numbers in potential market size with us, users, while disregarding out opinions that hey, this is an entirely free market that has professional software for video editing, photo editing, UI design, etc, all except graphic design, and that's a niche you could target and be the first to market. I'm not the best person to talk to about potential market size, I'm just a user. That's why I recommended you talk to a company that's already in the business on linux and can actually give you stats for this, Black Magic Design. I'm not trying to assume that talking on these forums is all you guys do, but sometimes it feels like instead of being proactive and either talking to CodeWeavers or Black Magic Design, you'd rather pick and choose your proof and just say here that it's not viable to port to linux, despite all the links and info we give. Lastly, I'm sorry if this sounded too confrontational, I'll try to be more calm in the future, for now I have a meme that fits the situation

Exactly that. And that's exactly why apps and games aren't flocking to the Linux desktop. Because we just don't know if we will make any money at all from it. Let alone cover the initial costs of development. I disagree, if anything what I got from that comment is that some people want to pay for things, as long as they're FOSS because when the company fails, at least people will be able to learn from the available code of the FOSS app, instead of starting from scratch. That doesn't mean that they represent the entire userbase. I think this is something that should be discussed with someone like Black Magic Design, who offers a paid studio version of DaVinci Resolve, and see what their numbers are in terms of people who pay for the studio version on linux, people who use the free version and how those numbers compare with the Windows numbers. They're probably in the best place in the market to give Serif advice on this, since video editing and graphic design are similar industries with a lot of crossover. As far as gaming goes, it's an entirely different beast from a design app, there's way less stuff going on behind the scenes and to be fair, most game developers either use an in-house engine, which they spent years developing because it's such a huge beast to manage and they haven't planned for linux ahead of time, or they use one of the existing Unreal Engine & Unity engines and either don't know enough about the linux market or don't have the capacity to export to linux. Or I guess there could also be the case they just don't care about Linux, or are entirely reliant on steam's Proton development which makes most games playable on linux. Sadly, Affinity does not have that benefit, Proton doesn't work on Affinity and even this attempt to get Serif to work with CodeWeaver seems to be a "oh let them contact us first" as if it's CodeWeaver themselves who would benefit from this, not you who'd get access to an entirely new market at the price of... a few hours of e-mailing? Also, Mark, for the same reasons you mentioned you could say "oh people use free browsers, play free games and use free apps like inkscape, figma, gimp, photoshop online and others on windows, we don't know if we will make any money at all from it." and yet you did. I hope you can see how this sort of statement can appear biased to someone like me when there are a multitude of other better reasons to make the jump.

I think it's just a general sentiment that linux has that FOSS apps help the ecosystem more than proprietary apps, as a user put it in one comment, and I get that, I just think that it's a waste of time to invest so much time and money into a FOSS alternative when even a proprietary app like affinity struggles to take away from Adobe's market.

Oh well, this went as well as I would've expected.

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

All the things I mentioned in my previous post. Using this as the method to gauge interest is flawed because it has so many barriers that will filter out people before they can actually say "me too!"

You don't get it, affinity photo already has the bugs attached to it. The Affinity suite has the same core code, and it's that code that's bugging out (working on the artboards, making new documents). I have barely used affinity photo myself and i'm also an affinity designer user mainly but consider this: if hypothetically no one here has an account before now, and they use their vote for this only, we only need 130 more people to vote (AP has 18 votes at the time of this comment). If we split the votes up it's more than double that to get both to 407 and even more if we also have publisher people vote for that app separately. For this purpose of porting the suite, one app should cover most bases as they share a large chunk of their code. That's why I said earlier to keep the votes contained in one app, not because I'm a Photo user.