Renzatic

And it only took 30 years!

I agree.

One argument that has been held against Linux support for the Affinity Suite, is that it's already being built for 3 platforms and supporting Linux would only hinder support, or progress on those existing platforms.

Agnostic cross-platform development has come a long way in 10 years and many modern development methodologies embrace developing once, for support under multiple platforms.

Perhaps the stronger argument is not to develop a 4th target platform for the Affinity Suite, rather re-approach the development process so there's one body of source that is platform agnostic.  Windows, OSX, Linux, even tablet, largely same source code.  The tools handle cross-compiling natively for target platforms.  I don't suggest it's a trivial task to migrate a code-base, but such a consideration could expand platform support with potentially much lower development overhead going forward.  I'm sure the dev team and such are best positioned to weigh that up though.

The way I see things going, with Wine/Proton growing in support and compatibility, and Windows Subsystem for Linux being a thing, I see the future being fairly platform agnostic.
There's no reason to fret when Windows can run Linux apps, and Linux can run Windows apps. Just pick whichever you like best.
EXPERIENCE THE POWER OF LINUX!

I can play Crystal Caves though.
 

The way I see things going, with Wine/Proton growing in support and compatibility, and Windows Subsystem for Linux being a thing, I see the future being fairly platform agnostic.
There's no reason to fret when Windows can run Linux apps, and Linux can run Windows apps. Just pick whichever you like best.
EXPERIENCE THE POWER OF LINUX!

Yeah, you can. When you get right down to the bare basics, the only real differences between all these various distros is when they update their libraries. Appimages, flatpaks, and snaps solve this problem by including all the libraries with it, making this a non-issue.
...as has been stated many a time before in this very thread.
But what about desktop environments? Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, etc. etc. etc.? Doesn't matter. They're all cross compatible with each other. Worst case scenario is that you get an app that doesn't fit in with the style of the rest of your desktop. But hell, Windows users have been facing this problem for years and years now, and it hasn't been a dealbreaker. It's the same on Linux.
But what about package managers, distro specific installers, and all that good stuff? Yeah, back in the day, it was something of a pain when you had an .rpm file, but you were on a Debian based distro, and you had to use something like Alien to convert the installers. It's hardly an issue anymore though. Why? Because you have appimages, flatpaks, and snaps now. Package managers these days are more about how your distro updates itself, and where you get your FOSS software.
It's just not as big of a deal as you think it is anymore. If the Affinity suite were to come to Linux, all Serif would have to do is target a distro to serve as a base to support, and they're done.

Yeah, and I'm telling you they're all POSERS! Like those people who drop $3 grand on a Macbook Pro, and only use it to hit up Facebook and Instagram.
FOR SHAME!

That's probably cuz they were all posers.

That's probably cuz they were all posers.

+1 on a Linux version.

I remember Carrara back in the 90s - even at that time it was a bit of an outlier. It had potential, but it just couldn't compete very well.
It is extremely outdated for 3d software. Serif would have to rewrite the core of Carrara altogether to allow it to compete and that is never going to be lucrative: Blender's usability has jumped ahead by leagues in the latest versions, and is now quite easy to get into for a beginner. And obviously Blender is light years ahead of Carrara in terms of functionality.
Carrara belongs in the archives of old defunct 3d software, unfortunately.
I am amazed that Daz is still selling it for $285! But it seems they actually merely selling their 3d assets and Carrara happens to be part of that deal. It's not even compatible anymore with Mac Os. Serif would be sinking cash in a very VERY deep money pit.
It would be preferable for Serif to acquire LightWave instead (but that's going to have a really tough time competing with Blender as well...).

Most of the issues with Gnome were ironed out by 2015. Gnome 4 basically took that, and switched it from a vertical layout to a more standardized horizontal one.
 
Yeah, let's not let this devolve into some internet style platform war BS, huh?
 
Like I said, it works for me.
I don't recommend Linux to everyone. If your primary concerns are 2D graphic design, it'd be better to stick with Windows and Macs, yeah.
Considering I admitted to such just below, that's not much of a revelation. The Affinity programs are my one big exception.

Most of the issues with Gnome were ironed out by 2015. Gnome 4 basically took that, and switched it from a vertical layout to a more standardized horizontal one.
 
Yeah, let's not let this devolve into some internet style platform war BS, huh?
 
Like I said, it works for me.
I don't recommend Linux to everyone. If your primary concerns are 2D graphic design, it'd be better to stick with Windows and Macs, yeah.
Considering I admitted to such just below, that's not much of a revelation. The Affinity programs are my one big exception.

Hey, i'll take what i can get. I have a core i7-10700 to soak up the inefficiency and make it almost disappear. I have had to run windows in a VM for a very long time to run certain software. No problem.
I have an old copy of windows 7. You can also use an unregistered copy of windows 10 ( it won't allow you to customize it - not much of a punishment ) for use in the VM. Whether you pay for a vmware player license is up to you.
You could also put in elbow grease and use looking glass and get native-like 3d/2d graphics speed by utilizing a second GPU.
@Renzatic- there's an updated tutorial for GPU pass-through with looking glass here, if you haven't seen it:
I love Linux on the Desktop and am a professional Linux server admin for some large systems myself also. Understand the two realms very well.
This isn't perfect, but it works for now. I may chime in later with some experience with looking glass to see if i can achieve near zero latency on the video output. Would be nice to be operating in more like 60fps than 30fps.
Running affinity through intel integrated graphics driving three monitors might be part of my 30fps problem, not the virtualization technology itself, BTW! 

Appears to work flawlessly and with very low latency due to the better graphics support in 'vmware player' for linux.
Problem solved, i should have never tried the WINE route. Affinity designer works great.
I can route my wacom tablet into the VM's USB port  and use it with relatively low latency - the extra delay doesn't interfere with drawing.

The windows graphics score is very different in vmware player vs virtualbox. Notice that virtualbox on the right can't even support aero graphics..

Installing looking glass may not be worth it. I think this is an OK way to run affinity on linux for now.

Looking glass is an easier way to do what you're describing, and people play the heaviest of 3d windows games on it all the time.
I've done all my work a Windows 7 virtual machine regardless of host OS for 10 years now.. i can tell you that a VM is easy to setup and live with 

Learning how to do hand painted textures is something I've been wanting to do for a long, long while now. I like the style, I like the look, I think it's quite neat. Thing is, I've always put off trying it out for myself because I know next to nothing about digital painting. I know quite about about manipulating photos to make textures, and a goodly bit about modeling them in a 3D editor, but painted textures are something I figured would always be just out of my reach.
Then I realized that the only reason why I don't know how to do it is because I've never tried it. That the only thing between me and success is a good bit of practice.
So here I am. Last Thursday, I decided to do one texture a day for the next month to see how I take to it. I've crammed a few hours of tutorials on Youtube, inspected other people's works, and just studied the hell out of it. Minus some stumbles here and there, I can already see a slight improvement just after a week with it. It started out with my admitted janky first texture, and has come to today, with a grass texture that's actually surprisingly good.
This thread will act as my diary, detailing my journey from totes noobis, to maybe hopefully pretty decent. If anyone wants to add or critique what I've done, feel more than free. I'm always up for some tips, tricks, and a bit of harsh, but honest criticism. 
(FYI, these images are scaled down from their original size)
Day 1. My first attempt. It is, like I said, kinda janky. To my credit, at least you can tell what it is.

Day 2. Another stone floor. Probably the one texture I spent the longest time with. Trying to get the shading just right.

Day 3. A wood floor. This one was, eh...okay. It's a little flat and plain, kinda rough, but hey. Just my third day.

Day 4. Wooden roof shingles. This is where I felt like I was starting to get a slight feel for things. It's still pretty sloppy, and you can see a few areas where I guffed up, but it's not bad.

Day 5. Stone tiles. My least favorite of the bunch, and the one I spent the least amount of effort on, truth be told. I tried to do something in a celshaded style. Ended up just looking bland.

Day 6. My 2nd attempt at a wood floor. It's certainly better than my first, with some actual texture and depth to it.

Day 7. Grass. Dunno if I'm improving, or if the stars happened to align just right on this one. It's the first texture I've done that I'd consider actually decent. Though if you look at it closely, you can see how I cheated things a bit.

And there you have it. My work so far. From here on out, I'll be posting one a day. Like I said, if anyone here wants to throw in their 2 cents, you're more than welcome.

The qualifier "in droves" brings to mind  fanboys queuing for the newest model iPhone... which I don't think is being suggested as the case with Linux.  That aside, I think the statement is reasonable.  Particularly in western countries, Microsoft and Apple dominate mind-share in the desktop market.  It's taken for granted by most consumers that a new PC will either be Mac or Windows.
It's interesting to look further abroad to other countries, such as India where adoption of Linux desktop apparently surpasses OSX.  Perhaps no big deal though, we're still only talking 3.92% market share... in a population of 1.4 billion persons!  Do the admittedly crude maths on that, and we have a much greater sum than the entire population of North America.  India is not an insignificant presence in the IT market, being a global hub of IT skills and developers.
 
Agreed.  If we're using Adobe CC as the example, then the options are very clear, there's really no way around needing Windows or OSX.
I'm primarily a developer.  Linux is built for development, with the base system designed and ready to build applications from source.  Likewise, the custom applications I build do well to run on Linux/BSD, so it makes sense to be developing, building and testing things on a similar system to what they'll be deployed to.
As a developer, I receive assets from graphic designers, which I need to then prepare for use in the applications I'm building.  I'd like to suggest that as a developer, expressing a need for Linux support of Affinity Photo, is not putting the cart before the horse.  It's pointing to a gap that goes unfilled, perhaps unrecognised, in this market.
Stack Overflow, which I'm sure any developer is truly familiar with, in their latest survey has Linux being used by 25.32% of developers, just ahead of OSX.
JetBrains, creators of industry respected development tools, has Linux being used by 47% of developers, again ahead of OSX and not all that far off from Windows.

The most frontend/backend developers use Linux for their work. In fact, many web frameworks and tools will not even run properly in Windows or OSX. This is especially true of Windows without WSL. In the development space, Linux is the dominant platform.
These same developers do edit photos and vectors for their projects. This is especially true for frontend developers who frequently need to create or modify assets. I suspect this would be the largest professional audience for Affinity's products on Linux. I do not think it is a small market -- especially for Affinity Designer.
For sure, it's not as large a market as Windows/Mac, but it's not being shared with Adobe. When, you take this penetration into account, I would not be surprised if Affinity sold more copies of Designer on Linux than on other platforms.

Yes, very important functions like non-destructive editing, inbuilt CMYK capability, etc are yet to appear and I suspect it will be a few more years yet before we see them in Gimp. The only suggestion I can offer is to keep on donating so that the good work can continue.
If I may, please, I would like to make some constructive suggestions for you.
The first is to try developer Diolinux's PhotoGIMP patch for Gimp 2.10+ that make the UI more like Photoshop and that introduces the Photoshop shortcuts - https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP
The second suggestion is to try the online Photopea image editor and it should look quite familiar - https://www.photopea.com/
The third and final suggestion is to try out PhotoLine and while there is no official Linux version, the developers in Germany make sure that their software works well with Wine so that Linux users are not left out - https://www.pl32.com/
There are some brief guides to PhotoLine below:
http://www.russellcottrell.com/photo/PhotoLine/basic.htm
http://www.russellcottrell.com/photo/PhotoLine/downloads/PhotoLineTutorial.pdf
http://evrencomert.com/PhotoLine.htm
While the interface might be a bit old school, it really is a competent and capable image editor (picture enclosed).
I must stress that all the above options are no commercial threat to Serif Europe whatsoever precisely because Serif Europe does not yet offer any Linux versions of their Affinity products.
 

And it still won't have freaking adjustment layers.

I can get by without the vectors, but adjustment layers are a make or break feature for me. They're so important, I don't consider a photo editing app a photo editing app unless they're in there.
The good news is that adjustment layers and layer effects are planned for 3.2, which, given the improvements made in the 3.0 release, would finally make GIMP a fairly decent Photoshop/Affinity alternative. The problem is, no one knows how long that'll take. Given their track records, we could probably expect it by 2031 or so.

And it still won't have freaking adjustment layers.

I was being facetious.
Though I am deeply considering a Mac, which does tread on my geek street cred a bit.

Hey, it's been 4 days since the last post. Linux here yet?