Redsandro

@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.

@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This empirical evidence is pretty out of date.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.

@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.

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.

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.

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:
 

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.

I just noticed that the two Linux threads on this forum (this thread: "Affinity for Linux" and the other, similarly named, "Affinity Products for Linux")  each dwarf the activity of all other threads by a long shot (the only other thread in the neighborhood is "Sneak Peak at 1.7").  Look not only at the number of replies (which is significant and substantially outranks the other threads) but, even more impossing, the number of views.  As I have mentioned before, you see the same thing happening on Adobe's user forum.  It's been like this for some time.
As far as we know, both Adobe and Affinity still see it the same way.  Linux's marketshare is not worth their time.
 
So...
The forums aren't working.  I remember reading somewhere in my internet travelers (might have been this thread?) someone talking about their inside experience with a tech company in which the going-ons of the forums hardly reached supervisor level attention, let alone executives who make decisions.
 
I'm at a loss of how to proceed.  Petitions have never gotten much traction (with the pitiful response they have traditionally had, compared to enthusiasm I've seen elsewhere, I wonder if the problem was more about getting the petition seen, rather than lack of interest - might be time to consider another one - if we can get it into the hands of the right blogger / influencer - but you'd have to get millions of signatures, not thousands).  If I had the connections, the experience, the knowledge,  I'd foolishly consider trying to find the capital to build the alternative myself  (if I didn't, also, realize that it has taken decades for Adobe and Affinity to get their software to were it is now).    My only thought now, is to start imploring everyone who wants to pay good money for this, to begin donating to Krita (and others) and try to help them do to graphic design what Blender did for 3D.  That, at this point, I think is our best hope.  They already have the momentum, they just need more support (while they do get donations -if you follow their website,- the financial support they get from month to month is pretty in-substantial - and yet they still do wonders with it). 
I think a lot of the people who come to this thread are well aware of the catch-22 that Linux is caught in, in regards to market share/availability of commercial software), and how this single cause (getting a fully developed graphics / content developer sweet available for the platform), could potentially change the entire playing field for Linux desktop at large.
But, we remain stuck.
Any suggestions?

Not sure if relevant, but here is the English download page.
https://store.serif.com/en-us/update/windows/photo/1/
In case download contains i18n.

(on Fedora 30, Affinity 1.6.5.135)
 
Information
I tried to run Affinity previously, but only got to the point of "VK_CHILD_WINDOW_RENDERING" not being implemented and after not using Affinity Photo for a long time to stay with Linux I got the following message on Discord:

So I had to try it out and what can I say? It works flawlessly!
 
Installation
Download Affinity 1.6.5 from: "https://store.serif.com/de/update/windows/photo/1/"
The following commands are required to install and use Affinity Photo (Run EVERYTHING in the same terminal instance).
Open a terminal in the same folder, you downloaded Affinity into!
# Download and extract the correct wine version curl -L https://lutris.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/runners/wine/wine-lutris-vkchildwindow-4.12.1-x86_64.tar.xz > wine-lutris-vkchildwindow-4.12.1-x86_64.tar.xz tar xf wine-lutris-vkchildwindow-4.12.1-x86_64.tar.xz # Set the path to wine for winetricks to work correctly export WINE="$PWD/lutris-vkchildwindow-4.12.1-x86_64/bin/wine" # Remove the old wine prefix rm -rf ~/.wine alias wine=$WINE wine wineboot -i When this window opens, click on "Cancel"

# Downloading the newest version of winetricks curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks > winetricks chmod +x winetricks Now that everything is downloaded, and a new prefix was created, you have to install some dependencies.
Follow the instructions in the setups and click on "Reboot Now". You can ignore warnings by the setups.
# To prevent errors from mono ./winetricks remove_mono -q # For the installer ./winetricks dotnet35sp1 -q # For the main application ./winetricks dotnet472 -q # Set windows to 8.1, since aero is not found if set to win7 ./winetricks win81 -q Run the installer with: (Deselect desktop shortcut)
wine affinity-photo-1.6.5.135.exe Install DXVK to make Affinity Photo work
git clone https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk ./dxvk/setup_dxvk.sh install Affinity should now be installed under "~/.wine"
 
Desktop Shortcut
Run this code below!
cd ~/.local/share/applications/ echo "[Desktop Entry]" >> "Affinity Photo.desktop" echo "Name=Affinity Photo" >> "Affinity Photo.desktop" echo "Exec=$WINE '/home/$USER/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Photo/Photo.exe'" >> "Affinity Photo.desktop" echo "Icon='/home/$USER/.local/share/applications/$(ls ../icons/hicolor/256x256/apps | grep Photo | head -n 1)'" >> "Affinity Photo.desktop" echo "Type=Application" >> "Affinity Photo.desktop" echo "Categories=Photo;Utility;" >> "Affinity Photo.desktop"  

Hey guys,
it seems it's finally possible to run affinity products under linux.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/94180-running-affinity-on-linux-finally-works/
I will try that later tonight and might end up producing script or flatpak with builtin dependencies.
 
Relevant previous discussion:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65310-an-attempt-to-run-affinity-designer-on-linux-via-wine/&page=2&tab=comments#comment-467010

I think that's a statement without basis, the last one. However I agree with the core of the argument, serif is better off fixing the current issues (like the expand stroke bug, we'll soon reach 5 years since it's been first reported) than expanding into a new market. However I also have to poke holes at serifs previously mentioned accomplishments. Why boast about a platformless application core if you're not going to have it available on all platforms?

Well,
You avoided my main point, but really I think you guys are over-analysing this whole thing.
I want Serif to build stuff for my OS of choice because on that OS I have everything I want but one thing ... Serifs excellent and sensibly priced and marketed software. While making my argument I think that there are benefits to Serif, so I mention that. The only real argument from the customer side for building the thing is that there is a market for it. I think there is.  The rest is up to them. I am here to be counted.
If I said nothing then that would be dumb.
If I dug holes in the argument for what I want then that too would be dumb.

I work at Red Hat (I'm a UI Engineer even), so I contribute to Open Source projects (mostly web though since that's my expertise) and I contribute to Red Hat projects as well. I have also directly donated money to Blender, Krita, Audacity, Ardour, Inkscape, ElementaryOS, Solus, and other projects. I have no problem dropping money on useful tools (I don't even use Elementary or Solus and have given them $25)
There's a rock and a hard place that I think some of these FOSS Design tools struggle with, and it's being in the middle of the spectrum. There's the Enterprise (Where Red Hat shines, raking in BILLIONS), and there's the hobbyist/amateur. The latter are notoriously cheap (Like won't even shell out for Affinity cheap), and are most likely pirating the current Adobe suite. The former is a harder to break into and there's real real money. Then there are the people in the middle (Digital Designers such as myself).
There's plenty of people asking for it, even this one thread in one corner of the internet has garnered 37 pages of discussion. There are lots of conversations but not a ton of action, hence the reason I think someone could clean up in that middle Design space, and where a lot attempts are falling short (Gravit).

As for your personal stance, I actually suggest you would be better served just staying with Windows. You definitely aren't going to be able to "play all the games you want". You think creative software is bad? The Windows monopoly on gaming graphics with DirectX is much stronger than even that sweet sweet PSD vendor lock Adobe has you in.
 

 

Too bad Serif is a super closed company. I'd be interested in the metrics of volume seat licenses (100 or more) vs single licenses for Affinity Designer. I contend it's much higher on the latter, and I am going to say I misspoke about "Hobbyist", but rather it's not "Enterprise" level. I've yet to run across any Affinity products in the wild, and I've worked at some decent sized companies that are very design heavy. The only people I've run across using it, is hobbyists and freelancers that have a choice. Pros might be the target, but is it making headway in that department? I'd venture to say that Affinity Designer has a similar marketshare to the Linux Desktop. That doesn't make it not worth looking at though, now does it?
I'm basing it a lot on the use case of Blender. Blender is such good, creative software, that enterprise VFX houses not only use it, they've even migrated to the Linux platform for their asset pipelines. It's another benefit that it's open source, so internal tooling and pipelines can be developed around it.
Anyway, I have no real interest in petitioning Serif to port there program to Linux, I know a fools errand. I do know that I will drop AD the moment there's a package on Linux that serves my workflow.

While I realize it is not looking promising for a Linux version of Affinity products at the moment, I do hope you will keep it in mind. I work for a Visual Effects company in Wellington, NZ. We have approximately 1300 artists and developers who use Linux as a primary pipeline environment. We spend a lot of money of licensing software, so I would strongly disagree with anyone who says that Linux is for hobbyists and that we wouldn't buy software.
Our software licensing includes a fair chunk of Adobe licensing. We also have a lot of users who would like access to a program like Photoshop, but their departments cannot justify the annual spend for Adobe licensing. We also keep a lot of older machines so that the artists who require Adobe software have machines to run Windows software on. This increases both our power consumption and maintenance / support costs.
We are one of a large marketplace of Visual Effects companies who must be in a similar position, all using Linux for their primary pipeline.
We do have a few users who are dyed in the wool Photoshop users, as that is their bread and butter and has been for years, but we also have a lot of users who regularly pick up new software and are generally very happy to experiment.
Please keep us in mind before you write off the idea of Linux versions of your software.

@Mark Ingram I do believe the farther you distance yourself from Windows, the higher the percentage of creative people is. 
If one in a thousand Windows users is creative, and one in two hundred OSX users is creative, it would mean that your Windows and OSX sales are approximately the same.
One in 20 Linux users would need to be creative to have an equal sales share, and that's not going to happen.
 

Here's a graph of the world wide desktop market share over the last 12 months. Windows is about 50x higher than Linux. It's not that we're ignoring potential customers, it's just that the market isn't there. And a lot of people are talking about the raw cost of porting the software. Unfortunately just shipping a product doesn't stop costs at that point in time. There are on going costs for engineering, support, marketing, etc
Windows: 78.43%
macOS: 13.53%
Linux: 1.6%

Hi @Argo,
The Affinity team has already debated this internally and is not currently interested in the uncertain Linux market.
 
 
A lot of Linux users (myself included) have indicated they would pay double the Affinity license fee for native Linux versions, as an incentive for them to port them. I suggest we all use half of that money and donate it to people who'd receive it with open arms: Donate to GIMP, donate to Krita, donate to InkScape or donate to the Libre Graphics Meeting.

Hi @Argo,
The Affinity team has already debated this internally and is not currently interested in the uncertain Linux market.
 
 
A lot of Linux users (myself included) have indicated they would pay double the Affinity license fee for native Linux versions, as an incentive for them to port them. I suggest we all use half of that money and donate it to people who'd receive it with open arms: Donate to GIMP, donate to Krita, donate to InkScape or donate to the Libre Graphics Meeting.

Hi @Argo,
The Affinity team has already debated this internally and is not currently interested in the uncertain Linux market.
 
 
A lot of Linux users (myself included) have indicated they would pay double the Affinity license fee for native Linux versions, as an incentive for them to port them. I suggest we all use half of that money and donate it to people who'd receive it with open arms: Donate to GIMP, donate to Krita, donate to InkScape or donate to the Libre Graphics Meeting.

In my experience there is too much performance loss in a classic VM with shared hardware. Really bad framerate. Don't do it. Don't take my word for it; try it out with the Designer Trial version first.
What is reported to work pretty good is a VM using a dedicated video card (and plenty of RAM) for Affinity using VFIO. The video card will be more costly than a Windows license, and it takes some time to set up, but you'll definitely save a lot of time not being handicapped without access to your computer as would happen when dual-booting.
@Qu4ntumSpin suggested something like https://looking-glass.hostfission.com/ to tie it all together.
 
@xam @D’T4ils this topic really becomes quite interesting when you add half a dozen people or so to the ignore list.
 
Serif is not going to do this (1). I prefer backing a team that does want to work towards a Linux version. There are however no real quality contenders besides Adobe and Serif, right?
So (2) is an option if we can get someone to map everything necessary without any support from Serif whatsoever, but perhaps 3 would be better:
3. Can we create a script to hot-switch VFIO between Linux and Affinity-VM using only one videocard? Though unrelated, this seems to attempt exactly this.

Hi everyone,
Just to shine some information here related to the following questions because it does not only apply to Serif product, but basically to anything you want.
Concerning VM performance, you must understand that there is multiple type of VM's.
If you are planning to start "VirtualBox" and that's it. Then you can expect very poor graphical performance for any application.

What you need to get near native performance, yes you can absolutely play AAA games, your CAD app, etc,  this way without much performance loss.
I am using QEMU with a dedicated video card (Yes I have 2 cards in my system).
The process to setup VFIO + KVM is not complicated It is built into linux ! And there is enough video tutorial out there. If you know how to modify one file. install programs on linux and you have the hardware this will likely take you an hour the first time to set up. Then about 5 to 10 minutes the following times.
What you need to know :
- VFIO allows you to passthrough your gpu to your VM (All of this, depends on your machine - IOMMU)
- KVM if you respect architecture (Linux 64 with Windows 64) to get near native performance inside your VM
- If you don't have a monitor to spare, you can use SPICE to see what's going on in your VM, but for gaming performance you will want LookingGlass (It literally copies gpu buffer from one gpu to the other, and now it allows full copy/paste between your VM and Linux)
- You are running 2 systems, so 8GB RAM... no go... (16 at least for a great experience, and 32 if you want to go all in)
- At least 4 cores, but preferably 6 or 8, so you can share 4/4 to each system. Yes, 4 cores and 8 threads each will allow you to play your Appex / Fortnite High settings etc.  or whatever else is trending nowadays.
- If you can game on it, you can compute & work on it.
- More complicated, but you can also do that with MAC OS (Though, it is against their TOS, so it's up to you)

How to setup QEMU+KVM (very old video - 3 years ago !): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16dbAUrtMX4 
Learn more about QEMU: https://www.qemu.org
Learn more about KVM : https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/virtualization/what-is-KVM

From the creator of LookingGlass NOV 2018 (The demo starts around 4:30) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a322V4yo3nY
Yes you can, it's complicated, it depends on the driver most of the time. I do not recommend it for the majority of users. And you loose the ability to go back and forth between your VM and Linux machin without interupting your Linux Work. Which is exactly why this QEMU+VFIO is nice.
Often people forget, but you might already have 2 gpu's. One with your intel / amd processor and your dedicated graphics card
Here for example this guy is running it's display from the motherboard output (intel gpu) and shares is main dedicated gpu with the VM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssfvpLXK8po

If you are really going into this stuff :  https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/
Gaming on Linux( Native & VM) From Linus Tech Tips and Wendel : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsgI1mkx6iw  << If you watch only one, then look at this one.
5 minutes of VFIO/IOMMU on Arch : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_2dtnU4Awk

There is so much resources out there, I can't share everything. But now you have all that you need to run all Serif applications and more, without leaving the comfort of your Linux desktop.
EDIT: I didn't mention it, but you can pass through any device that you want of course. I am passing though a wacom tablet and a keyboard.
But that's all entirely optional. You can even pass through a sound card (usb headset for example)... etc.

EDIT 2: If you have pro card either from AMD or Nvidia. It is likely that you have SR-IOV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11Fs0NHgzIY Pro cards allow you to share a single card at the same time against multiple vm's.
EDIT 3: To have an amazing sound experience between your VM (Windows ) and HOST (linux) You can use "scream"
https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream#using-ivshmem-between-windows-guest-and-linux-host 
This basically installs a new sound card into windows and you can listen to its sound on Linux either by multicast or just like Lookinglass through a IVSHMEM (A shared memory space).
This "scream" in combination with "lookinglass" really gives you a nice Seamless integration.
It's like opening a browser to navigate the web basically, you're just navigating your windows vm instead.

EDIT4:
Qemu 4 has landed and it brings a gazillion updates. Way better than 3.1. https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/4.0
So basically sound issues are mostly gone, so you might not need (EDIT 3) scream at all to get a nice experience.

Note on all these edits.
There is many changes since I did my last setup. Mine is working fine for me, I don't have time to get up to speed with the new stuff, my clients come always first.
Basically everything is getting even better (who could have guessed...).

Enjoy !

Does it make you feel good trying to provoque other people? Do you get pleasure out of it? We don't really need any trolls around here. If you're not going to contribute to our discussion, I would ask you to refrain yourself from posting around here. Thanks.