Redsandro

What if it was the other way around? Would you notice? As @justajeffy said. This is not uncommon. I vividly remember the video compositor called Shake. For years, Shake was $2999 for Mac OS X and $4999 for Linux. Some time after Apple bought Shake, the price for OS X dropped to $499 while the price for Linux stayed at $4999.

Just.. wow. That's some bending down backwards logic just to be angry. Mozilla does actually legally owe Debian redistribution rights of their browser because it is a right explicitly granted in their Mozilla Public License. Mozilla owns the trademark "Firefox" and demanded Debian stopped using the trademark. So moving on is exactly what Debian did. Just change the name to stop the nagging from Mozilla's legal team. "Can they just do that?" Yes they can, because Mozilla released Firefox as open source. Apparently it rubbed you the wrong way 15 years ago and still does. Affinity is not open source, so it will not have that problem. Eventually Mozilla realized that this situation hurt their brand awareness so they granted Debian the right to use the name "Firefox". I understand now why "the Linux community" has not been as accommodating to your interpretation of events as you had hoped.

You sound a bit salty. Please be careful with your interpretation of the facts when preaching to an audience. Like it or not, Debian has ideals of freedom for users in the broadest sense of the word. It was the Mozilla Corporation - not Debian - that demanded Debian stopped making changes to the (open source) source code of Firefox that would integrate Firefox better with Debian. So Debian had to re-brand for legal reasons in order to retain their freedom to make changes to the code. Also note that this issue is almost 15 years old, as is perhaps your experience with Debian. The Mozilla Corporation saw that they weren't being helpful in the open source community while claiming to be a part of it, so Mozilla repealed the demand almost 5 years ago. Firefox ESR has been available in the current stable branch ever since, and the non-ESR version will be available after the ESR life cycle. Personally I think vanilla Debian isn't a good desktop choice apart from a specific audience. People usually take a Debian-based derivative such as LMDE. Debian even recommends using a Debian derivative in stead of pure Debian on their website. The power of Debian's conservative approach to changes is that it's one of the most stable distros out there. You do know that Ubuntu is a Debian derivative directly based on Debian-testing, right? So I guess the suggestion for Debian is based more on the idea that targeting Debian-testing targets the same foundation that is used for Crunchbang, Deepin, Devuan, Kali Linux, Knoppix, LMDE, PureOS, SolusOS, SteamOS, Ubuntu and more.

I have a slightly different impression. They have mentioned a couple of times that the core of the software is actually already multiplatform. They "only" have to develop the GUI. The GUI is tightly tailored to the operating system for usability and aesthetic purposes. So while your end conclusion is the same, it's not about performance, but about usability. In theory they could write a rough ugly Qt or GTK+ interface for Linux and be done; the core is already done. But like every commercial party, they know the power of aesthetics and usability. An ugly hard to use interface makes the product looks 10 times worse, even if the core is equally powerful (read: identical).

I have a gigabit up/down (1000/1000 mbit) fiber in my house too for the last 5 years now. This really changes the way you see "internet". My friends and colleagues who have gigabit fiber too; offices of customers, it's like they are all internal storage devices. The bottleneck is no longer our connections; it's the servers of external services. 50 kilometers south of me they have started offering a 10 gigabit up/down connection. I wouldn't know what to do with this, because even my RAID cluster I use for work (video) writes about 230 MByte/second as an absolute maximum. That's not even 2 gigabit. But keep in mind that this cluster can be considered old; new drives or even SSD are becoming heaps faster. For example, if you shop for an NVMe M.2 drive, you see al these new PCIe 4.0 drives that are so fast that they come with coolers. PCIe 4.0 SSDs are designed for 5000 MByte/s (read) and 4400 MByte/s (write), significantly faster than PCIe 3.0. But imagine this. IIRC my 2014 DDR4 memory has a speed of 8 Gigabit. So that 10Gbit fiber would be faster than my computer memory. Making @SrPx's dream a reality. Of course, then came DDR5 memory with 50 Gbit/s and they are working on GDDR6 with 768Gbit, but it's not like my 2014 computer feels slow. I know western countries like Germany or certain states in the U.S. have many places with old technologies where people dream of getting even 200 mbit/s on their internet connection as if it's a fantasy straight from Star Wars, but that's because everyone already pays good money to keep the old system up and no one is interested in investing in a new technology because of it. But you already see that eastern countries like Romania has places where they skip the old technology that they never had and went straight to fiber. The west is slowly catching up, but 5 years ago, a third of the world top 15 cities with the fastest average broadband speed were Romanian. This is called dialectics of lead. If once you(r county) was/were the first, now you're probably last in line. But the transition to 1000/1000 Mbit or even 10/10 Gigabit is happening now. Or actually started 10 years ago. Internet speed really is a fading argument. Some places in former head start countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, France, Sweden and Ireland were lucky to get it as early as 2012 because they made the biggest radio telescope emulator in the world (LOFAR) and needed a fiber infrastructure for that. Now it's the other way around: Because countries like Poland and Latvia make a fiber network, they also add LOFAR stations to extend the telescope because they might as well. But even people that have 20/20 (cable D2) or 500/50 (cable D3) or similar using the 1940's network of coax cable, they can look forward to some major new developments once their (hopefully not) monopolist overlords decide to invest in some new DOCSIS equipment. D3.1 (being rolled out now) can go up to 10000/1000 mbit, and D4 to 10000/6000, rivaling current fiber speeds. If you have cable internet, technically you're good (pending overlord investments). People limited to using the 1890's cupper phone line network are really starting to see the limitations of their network. Their providers can decide to upgrade the equipment to VDSL2 17a for a maximum speed of 100/100 mbit for the luckiest ones living close to the phone station. And in the future, when really stretching it, they think they can do VDSL2 35b 400/400 mbit. But that's really the end of it, and every meter you live further down the line, you'll lose speed. If you have cupper internet as your only option, technically you're on a dead end street. Write to your representative and tell them your town needs fiber before it's too late and everyone else's "cars" can "drive 700 Mph" except the ones from your town. I have deviated from the topic somewhat but I hope this was an interesting read.

This is currently our only hope, as the Affinity team will not work on a Linux version for at least this major release cycle of the suite. However, currently a WINE version does not work. With some hacks you can get the app running, but it will crash as soon as the art board is initialized. The OpenGL or Direct3D initialization (I forgot which one is used in the latest version) has some unmapped functions that causes the crash AFAIK. What we do know from recent experience with WINE and Proton is that - unlike running a VM - WINE performance could be similar to a native Windows version. We should have a FAQ for this topic, because most questions have been answered now. All we can do is wait for some WINE or Proton devs to figure out what functions to map to WINE libraries, or start a crowdfund to pay a WINE dev to do so.

These are some really strong arguments. Remember that time when Serif told us that the Affinity product cores are platform independent already? Clearly they anticipated going multi-platform with their GUI back when they were Mac only.

I hear this statement from time to time over the last 6 years. It usually shows what type of work you do and how you use your computer. People care less about their OS and more about one specific tool when they use this tool exclusively, fulltime for the entire week or month. For example when they are an employee with one task in a big company. People care more about their OS and less about one specific tool when they multitask in multidisciplinary fashion, for example when they are indie game developers, work for a small studio, are self-employed or use the software as a hobby. The reason has been discussed multiple times, and I'm surprised that people still "don't get" it: The multidisciplinary developer already has 11 tools and 4 toolchains running on their favorite OS; in this thread that's Linux. Booting to a different OS means not having those 15 assurances. Suddenly you're handicapped. It's not worth it, unless you're going to do one single task for the entire day. And even then it's annoying, because you don't have your favorite music playlist, screen calibration software, video conferencing software, storage configuration and all that other secondary stuff running. Splitting call history, conversations and configurations between two operating systems is just plain annoying. Adjusting every configuration twice is annoying. It's not worth it. Many of us - me included - have the Affinity license, did use it on a foreign OS for some time, but have given up on using Affinity products because it's not worth switching OS in order to use it. So we ask: Can we have a Linux version? We'll even pay again. Because paying for a good tool that works in your favorite OS is worth it.

Don't forget that Apple has $250 billion sitting on a bank account gathering dust. It wouldn't surprise me if at some point they use some of it to "brute force" Apple's success.

That's a fair opinion. Others think different, and opine that the market is artificially small. It's the famous chicken and egg problem. We simply do not know. We can't definitively argue a position. We can enhance a position with anecdotal evidence, or even debate a market share multiplier for example by suggesting that user characteristics imply Linux (3.38%) could have a higher degree of creatives than MacOS (9.46%) has, similar to how MacOS might have a higher degree of creatives than Windows (86.69%) has. Since the adjusted MacOS marketshare for Affinity is 9.46/(86.69+9.46)*100 = 10%, Affinity could test this hypothesis by verifying that more than 10% of their sales are for the MacOS platform. Because if the MacOS number is 25%, it would mean the creative market share om MacOS is 2.5x bigger than the actual market share. Extrapolated to Linux, the creative market share would be similar to that of MacOS. However, when this was proposed, Affinity didn't share those figures, so we cannot argue a position on that. If this is literally about numbers, we could propose a no-cure-no-pay scheme like a crowdfunding campaign where a minimum sum of money would need to be raised, but Affinity already emphasized that they do not approve, will not support a crowdfund, and will not make a Linux version even if the money target would be reached. So we cannot probe any interest from that. So, with all avenues closed, we the users cannot definitively argue a position, and the market for creative commercial software on Linux is now Schrödinger's egg. We don't know if the chicken exists until there is professional grade photo and vector software on Linux. All we can do is share opinions. However, when an opinion includes ad hominems like "rabid", or empty platitudes like "It is not Serifs job to make Linux grow", it comes across as rather bitter, and we're left to speculate on the motivations and interests that inspire such fallacies.

Actually, I see a lot of users here with a license for the Mac and/or Windows version of Affinity products, would like to have a chance to (find out what it's like to) switch to Linux. It's often that people's first experience with Linux is a positive one, and they quickly learn that their newfound enthusiasm is met with outdated opinions, arguments from ignorance, and psychologically interesting ad hominems like rabid and zealot in which an attempt is made to argue against the positive experiences of the new Linux user by likening their personal computing choices to the the characteristics of a small idealistic group of Stallmanists in the hopes of discrediting these newfound opinions by their Windows using peers, who are afraid that some formerly trivial minority OS like Linux might take away some of their software support privileges when developers might actually choose at some point to divert some of their focus and attention to this new upcoming reality. Don't worry, you've got nothing to fear from this thread for at least the entire 1.x release branch.

Linus Tech Tips made a general comparison between Windows and the new Ubuntu 20.04 with a pretty fair pro's and con's list. Interesting watch.

Just like to point out that both of you should be careful with math. 😅

https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-brings-linux-certification-to-thinkpad-and-thinkstation-workstation-portfolio-easing-deployment-for-developers-data-scientists/

Linux desktop market share above 3% for second month in a row now, rising to 3.17%. Considering MacOS is consistently around 9-10%, I wonder at what point Affinity might become interested. Would Designer have been made for MacOS if it only had 6% market share in stead of 9? What about 3%? https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?options={"filter"%3A{"%24and"%3A[{"deviceType"%3A{"%24in"%3A["Desktop%2Flaptop"]}}]}%2C"dateLabel"%3A"Custom"%2C"attributes"%3A"share"%2C"group"%3A"platform"%2C"sort"%3A{"share"%3A-1}%2C"id"%3A"platformsDesktop"%2C"dateInterval"%3A"Monthly"%2C"dateStart"%3A"2019-05"%2C"dateEnd"%3A"2020-05"%2C"plotKeys"%3A[{"platform"%3A"Linux"}%2C{"platform"%3A"Mac OS"}%2C{"platform"%3A"Chrome OS"}]%2C"segments"%3A"-1000"} I'm guessing people in lockdown are giving linux another try due to all the new releases with preinstalled video drivers, and are surprised to find that many Windows games play smoothly for both the Steam and Epic launcher. Combined with Epic's every week a free game marketing, it's tempting.

WindowsLatest.com: Windows 10 market share drops as Ubuntu record growth Could that be due to many people working at home because of the Corona crisis? Perhaps computers at the office have Windows on them, while some private home computers run Linux.

One last thing about this. Is your experience (be honest) from before two LTS releases ago (2016)? I just stumbled upon this testimony:

Oh yeah, we use Blackmagic Davinci Resolve (licensed), Fusion, Houdini and Blender. On CentOS. Mostly colleagues though; I'm not doing the NLE stuff. I use Ubuntu (which doesn't play nice with Blackmagic) mostly for scripting (python) which plugs into Blender, which does play nice on Ubuntu.

@Mark Ingram No support. No QA. No Marketing. Just try to get a bronze rating or more if possible. If at least it runs, WINE devs will try to iron out the kinks on the WINE side. Don't move heaven and earth, but for example (I have to make up an example) if there are 10 installer frameworks out there, and two installers don't work in WINE at all, pick one of the 8 that do work. It's definitely not free, as all testing takes time. It will require at least one developer to dual boot. I have seen one employee here - I forgot their name - mention they are a fan of Linux themselves. If it takes 5% of one developer's time to "manage and investigate WINE compatibility", maybe it will be worth it. Currently, Photo and Designer do start, but crash on creating a new document. Is that a really complex crash related to deep functions, or is it a trivial system call that can be replaced without drawbacks on the Windows side? Maybe you'll find out that it didn't even take that much effort to make Affinity run near perfect on WINE, like Photoshop CC or Exposure X5. Or you'll find out that it's just near impossible for reasons. But maybe it's worth it to dedicate some small amount of resources. That's true. It's not your responsibility to listen to 25 pages of testimonies. If you don't want to, the story ends. If however you are interested in finding a middle ground way to honor the wishes here described, you could say that WINE has 80% of Windows mapped (this is a made up number), and for the critical function calls, "all you need to do" is stay within that 80%.

@Mark Ingram You don't consider Proton a huge leap forward, or didn't know how actively it's being developed? Last new Steam feature for Linux I saw was creating secure isolation (sandbox) containers with different environments for different games. They've recently created Game Scopes so games are now more freely separated from the system video settings But most importantly, Proton is very actively being developed and version 5.0 was released last month. Valve partnered with CodeWeavers to work on WINE. This is now (2018-2020). Not 2012. This empirical evidence is pretty out of date. There is this very popular friendly Pop!_OS that comes pre-installed with System76 laptops. Exclusively. It is the new old Apple; I see people that want to be cool with a System76 laptop in the coworking space. On a manual (re)install, it even has native Nvidia graphics drivers running in the installer. Not even Windows 10 does that. A more vanilla Ubuntu comes preinstalled on Dell XPS laptops. Ubuntu 20.04 is the latest LTS release, released just one week ago. They have begun rolling out the Snap store, an online software center. Installing Pop!_OS or Ubuntu is now arguably easier than installing Windows, but definitely faster. Anyway, I'm not trying to convince you to develop on Linux or anything, although perhaps I'm trying to bring your perception up to date a bit. What I would very much like to convey though, is this message from CodeWeavers (from the above article): It's been asked a few times but - as far as I know - not really addressed: Can you - or why can't you - work around the things that break WINE? It's not like Windows apps can't be performant without breaking WINE, as evidenced by the WINE games that run faster under WINE than native Windows. It might consist - we don't know because it wasn't addressed - of something trivial that would make a lot of owners of a Affinity Windows license happy at the cost of very few development hours. They might not bring you new income, but once word gets out that a latest version runs well, more Linux users will buy Windows licenses.

@Mark Ingram thank you for replying, even though you're restating what you stated before. It is appreciated to hear the current perspective and intention "renewed" with a fresh reply. I think it's a gamble, as some people believe that the Linux market share/demand is merely artificially small because the product/supply is not there. The wish to transition to Linux is, though, for reasons. You think it's not worth your while, and that's fair. It's interesting to keep an eye on Steam, because they seem to take the opposing end of the gamble, and invest a lot of time and money into developing on Linux. I don't think they are idiots. But I do understand they have a bigger budget to take risks. In that sense, I disagree with your notion that "the fact is". In stead, I'd rather say that you "need to follow the current market statistics rather than speculate on the size of the potential market" (demand) that is desperately waiting for your (or a competitor's) product (supply) as evidenced by 25 pages of testimony here, "for security reasons." Because the latter has the benefit of being closer to the truth, and won't alienate your 25 pages of Linux users that have been trying to convince you that it is, in fact, not a fact, for the past 4 years.

Okay. You were being ambiguous then. You seemed to talk about the Linux Foundation and how they should do something contrary to their mission. Also, the Linux Foundation doesn't really care about desktop. False. Look at this topic. Look at pay what you want bundles. Linux users pay the most. Wine argues differently:

False. Node.js developers were the most sought after backend developers in 2019. It is a huge success story. True, but the first battle is won. Linux now supports far more games than OSX through new developments. It's starting to rival Windows. False. Ask Red Hat Enterprise Linux what they and their billions of revenue think about free software. I understand your frustration but please don't spread misinformation.

Just to stop the confusion before it starts: The Linux Foundation promotes commercial adoption of open source software and free standards. Affinity products are the exact opposite of what would meet these standards. Examples are Node.js, Embedded Linux and Tizen.

I think that's the second most realistic approach. One developer at Serif (forgot the username) is/was a Linux user themselves. They are probably aware of the massive new developments in WINE concerning OpenGL, Direct3D 12, Vulkan3D. I imagine if they figured out it's technically possible to make a lot of people happy by making a slight change in the Windows version, they would. Third option is they start working on a Linux version. The time they said "not now, maybe later" is what, 3 years old? Later is now. Perhaps we can ask @Andy Somerfield or @TonyB if new developments or this ongoing thread in the background has changed their perspective or ambitions at all.