Renzatic

Wine's ultimate goal is to provide a Windows application layer in Linux with 1:1 compatibility. Getting Photo and Designer running would mean, at the very least, that they now cover one extra use case they didn't previously.

Ditto. My three votes are now assigned to Photo.

Done for Photo. Though there doesn't seem to be an entry for any recent versions of Designer.

I actually use and rather enjoy Krita, but it only supports 8 bits per channel. That's normally not a problem, but for those occasions when I start hammering the gaussian blurs on a vignetting spree, you'll see tons of color banding if you're working in a lower bit depth. Krita gave me some pretty janky results. GIMP? Despite the fact that it claims to support 32-bit float, and despite me converting my image to such. it still had some pretty terrible color banding when I ran my layer through a blur. I ended up having to go back into Krita, and airbrush in my shadowing. It looked good, but it still took me about 10x as long. It's moments like this when I really, really miss Photo.

I ran into a situation where I had to use GIMP today, and... ...oh GAWD!

Hey, just letting you all know I'd still love to have my Affinity programs in Linux. If I could fire up Photo and Designer here, it'd be like having my cake, and eating it too. You all are the cakemasters. You can make my life complete.

Just spitballing here, but you could force everyone in the office to donate plasma twice a week.

If there's one thing I've come to notice during my time in Linux, it's how bad the font rendering is in Windows. I feel like a total nerd for nitpicking something like this, but hell, it's SO NICE having clear, clean text everywhere that doesn't look like it's padded in rainbow colored antialiasing.

The more I use Krita, the more I realize it's a better analog to Photo than I initially thought. It's geared more heavily towards digital painting than raw photo manipulation, but it can still do the latter fairly well. At the very least, it has some decent content aware/inpainting brush style tools, and honest to god non-destructive adjustment layers, both of which GIMP lacks. I'd still rather have Photo and Designer in Linux, but I'm finding I can use Krita without feeling like I'm sacrificing all that much. edit: You can even make it look pretty snazzy.

It's not the smoothest program in the world to use. To it's credit, it is a fairly capable little program, but it seems like it wants to fight you every step of the way.

It's not a bad name, but I wish the developers did more than a simple rebrand. It seems like a lot of effort made for the most minimal of returns

GIMP isn't exactly the most marketable name, no. That's why someone got the bright idea to fork the editor, and rebrand it as Glimpse! It would've been nicer if they took the codebase, and made some actual improvements to it. But no. It's the same GIMP we all know and slightly tolerate, with a slightly less embarrassing name.

...is that Gnome 2? Man, that's oldschool. For pure color editing purposes, I'm surprised you're not using Darktable. Being closer to Lightroom in style and functions, it's actually a good bit better than Photo and its analogs at that task. The problem is when you adjust your colors and lighting, and edit your shots, there isn't anything on Linux as good as.

Not for this exact kind of situation, but I have heard of petitions working before. Though you are right, a signature isn't a guaranteed future sale for Serif, though it does work as a potential show of support. The hope is that a lot of signatures equates to a lot of interest. Yeah, I understand why Serif hasn't fully committed to supporting Linux yet. There are lots of question marks that would make any small company think twice about it. Is there a large enough interest among the currently installed base for them to turn a profit? Are there a lot of people out there who only stick with Windows and MacOS just because they can't get their favorite programs on Linux, and would they move if said favorite programs became available? Yeah, there's a ton of potential to make money on the platform, but there's also just as much of a chance that they could lose their shirts in the attempt to support it. So I guess it's up to us to convince them it's worthwhile. ...in the meanwhile, I'm considering buying one of those new M1 Macbook Airs to pair with my desktop machine. That'd be my overly expensive second best option.

I'm not saying it's not worth trying to convince Serif to port their apps to Linux, rather that you should find a way to do so that doesn't require a monetary commitment up front, since that could open a can of worms no one wants opened. A petition would be a good start. Gets some signatures. Show that there is support. Personally, I find guilt tripping, and annoying them with musical cards to be pretty effective options too.

It's a good idea in theory, but there are a number of reasons why Serif would probably shy away from a preorder or crowdfunding setup. See, there are just too many potential pitfalls involved for them to roll with it. You'll have all these hundreds of people popping up to throw their money into the Linux Affinity fund, with the expectations that they WILL eventually get what they paid for at some point in the not too distant future. Serif takes the money, and begins plugging away at the porting process. ...but what if things don't quite go according to plan? Things end up taking far longer than expected, and even after all that time, they haven't been able to get the Linux Affinity revs running on par with their Mac and Windows counterparts. End result? You have all these people who spent all this time, effort, and money convincing Serif to build their products for Linux waiting 3-4 years for a bunch of slow, buggy programs. The internet being what it is, people will be angry. News will spread. Teeth will be gnashed. Death threats will be made. A moderate PR kerfuffle ensues, and a lot of the good will Serif has generated over the years could be lost due to various unforeseen circumstances. Now what are the chances of this actually happening? Probably pretty low, but the risks involved with crowdfunding are very real, and something that a lot of companies don't want to have to deal with. As much as I'd love to have my Affinity programs on Linux, I can understand why Serif is being overly cautious about things, and why they'll shoot down any attempts to give them money to help inspire them.

I'm far from being well versed with the desktop publishers, but I did download the .appimage just to try it out, and it seems...okay. It's easy to find out for yourself, since you don't have to install anything, nor register to try out the demo.

I say we mail them a bunch of annoying musical greeting cards every day until they finally get sick of it, and make Affinity available for Linux just to make it stop. For example...

Not at the moment, no. If I had to guess why the Affinity programs don't run well in WINE, I'd say it's because the WINE devs' primary concern is getting Windows games up and running in Linux, and if any desktop applications like Photoshop, Office, Affinity Photo, et al. end up working, that's mostly down to happy coincidence.

There is one other definition of the term, but, well, uh...just watch Pulp Fiction.

I'd say that Linux is still an OS for nerds, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing for Affinity's potential future on the platform, since their primary demographic are web designers, photographers, and 3D artists, all of which are... ...well, nerds. I mean, have you ever asked a photographer about their camera gear? The response you get is almost guaranteed to be the nerdiest thing you'll hear all day.

That'd be the potentially easiest option, though as far as that quote goes, they're talking about the cost of creating a native application. Though if you ever do decide to futz around with trying to get it running in WINE, and you manage to get things working decently well, don't forget to tell us here.

I'd imagine they're considering whether to leverage X11 or Wayland, KDE or Gnome, Ubuntu or Red Hat, etc. etc. Whatever would allow them to get the Affinity suite up and running with decent performance on Linux with as little struggle as possible.

That's basically what I've done in Windows and Linux, though I know there are various tweaks you can perform to maximize performance that I've never tried before. I know that within Linux, the best way to get the most bang for your buck is to set up a VM that can leverage your actual hardware, but it, uh, requires something of a commitment to attempt. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

You do have access to VMWare Workstation and Virtualbox in Linux. From my experiences, they're decent options if all you want to do is test drive an OS, but are clunky at best if you push them any farther than that. Though to be fair, it's possible I'm just very bad at setting up VMs, and I could get decent performance out of one if I had a better idea of what I was doing.