Qu4ntumSpin

Hello @Mark Ingram,
Thank you for your post and information.
I've recently published : 
And I have a request for you and your team that implies a very small dev effort.
Would it be possible to add a simple toggle info to our accounts (serif accounts, not forum) to add our targeted OS ?
Example, I would love to have my purchases count as towards Linux platform not Windows. Since you already implicitly do that for Windows / Mac OS, it would be nice to have an explicit button to indicate for Windows purchases that they are used by mainly Linux user.

I know how complicated it can be to get real meaningful stats. And with such a topic, you might even end with bots or false positives, people that would never actually buy your product. Have a little chat with your Marketing & Business team, but I think that metric could actually help. And even if you don't do anything with it, I would actually feel pretty great about it

I got this idea from Steam itself. When a user on Linux purchase a Windows game, it might or might not work on Linux, but that doesn't matter, Valve is counting it as a Linux purchase, and seriously that is awesome. Because that's a proper metric to have that reflects reality.

With that, have an amazing day, keep up the good work ! I can't wait to try publisher, don't get me wrong, I love Scribus, but I was used to indesign, and your tools are simply AWESOME. This is why I vote with my wallet and keep purchasing your products.

Note 1: I am absolutely against the crowdfunding, this is not the way to go for a closed source project. If you want to go that route, let us vote with our wallet and purchase a Linux version with no promise of delivery, right on your page next to the other ones.

Note 2: People speaking about Akira... That project is a splendid demo on how NOT to do a modern design tool, specially in the Linux eco-system.
No cross platform, uses a specific tech that very few devs work on (VALA) and is not desktop agnostic. Just that should be a show stopper for anyone with a little love for all the diversity that exists in the Linux eco-system.
In addition to that : No proper feature set, no roadmap, no real activity in their code base (all branches included). https://github.com/akiraux/Akira .
TLDR: doing it right is not easy, and asking for money is not enough.

Want a good example on how to do it right ? Krita.org and their MANY successful crowdfunding. 
- 2014:  20k Euros (Accelerate dev) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source-digital-painting-accelerate-deve
- 2015:  30.5k Euros (Let's make it faster) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free-paint-app-lets-make-it-faster-than-phot
- 2016:  38.5k Euros (New text, new vector tools. svg2 support, etc.) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-2016-lets-make-text-and-vector-art-awesome
- 2018 : 27k Euros (Squash bugs) https://krita.org/en/fundraising-2018-campaign/ 

That's 116k Euros in 4 years of crowdfunding (and I most certainly forget some others they did). This doesn't included direct donations or steam purchases.
That's how you ask for money, your first build something great, then you lay down a great plan for growing up and then you ask for money.

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 !

nice to know as I would also totally dig it, I switched my Laptpo to Linux (Kubuntu) last august and it works pretty decently (win10 is ugly and the driver situation of 8.1 which I use as main on my other machines is, well, not pretty), and there are many things which work so much better after some setup which dont work as nice or not at all in windows (like for example having a german layout without the "dead" keys, or NOT forcing a US-Keyboard onto me while writing japanese or the pretty neat circular scrolling feature which doesnt work on all touchpads in windows etc etc)
honestly Linux in my opinion has only 2 things that are actually hard:
1) the setup (drivers and stuff)
2) programs (obvious)
and yeah I would totally dig affinity on Linux one way or another.
 
also I think the idea to have your purchase count as Linux instead of win/mac outlined in that one post pretty awesome:
 

@mzo
Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums  Thanks for your contribution. Yes we have considered that and that is one obvious good reason why we are not saying "never", just not now.

Hello @Mark Ingram,
Thank you for your post and information.
I've recently published : 
And I have a request for you and your team that implies a very small dev effort.
Would it be possible to add a simple toggle info to our accounts (serif accounts, not forum) to add our targeted OS ?
Example, I would love to have my purchases count as towards Linux platform not Windows. Since you already implicitly do that for Windows / Mac OS, it would be nice to have an explicit button to indicate for Windows purchases that they are used by mainly Linux user.

I know how complicated it can be to get real meaningful stats. And with such a topic, you might even end with bots or false positives, people that would never actually buy your product. Have a little chat with your Marketing & Business team, but I think that metric could actually help. And even if you don't do anything with it, I would actually feel pretty great about it

I got this idea from Steam itself. When a user on Linux purchase a Windows game, it might or might not work on Linux, but that doesn't matter, Valve is counting it as a Linux purchase, and seriously that is awesome. Because that's a proper metric to have that reflects reality.

With that, have an amazing day, keep up the good work ! I can't wait to try publisher, don't get me wrong, I love Scribus, but I was used to indesign, and your tools are simply AWESOME. This is why I vote with my wallet and keep purchasing your products.

Note 1: I am absolutely against the crowdfunding, this is not the way to go for a closed source project. If you want to go that route, let us vote with our wallet and purchase a Linux version with no promise of delivery, right on your page next to the other ones.

Note 2: People speaking about Akira... That project is a splendid demo on how NOT to do a modern design tool, specially in the Linux eco-system.
No cross platform, uses a specific tech that very few devs work on (VALA) and is not desktop agnostic. Just that should be a show stopper for anyone with a little love for all the diversity that exists in the Linux eco-system.
In addition to that : No proper feature set, no roadmap, no real activity in their code base (all branches included). https://github.com/akiraux/Akira .
TLDR: doing it right is not easy, and asking for money is not enough.

Want a good example on how to do it right ? Krita.org and their MANY successful crowdfunding. 
- 2014:  20k Euros (Accelerate dev) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source-digital-painting-accelerate-deve
- 2015:  30.5k Euros (Let's make it faster) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free-paint-app-lets-make-it-faster-than-phot
- 2016:  38.5k Euros (New text, new vector tools. svg2 support, etc.) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-2016-lets-make-text-and-vector-art-awesome
- 2018 : 27k Euros (Squash bugs) https://krita.org/en/fundraising-2018-campaign/ 

That's 116k Euros in 4 years of crowdfunding (and I most certainly forget some others they did). This doesn't included direct donations or steam purchases.
That's how you ask for money, your first build something great, then you lay down a great plan for growing up and then you ask for money.

Not in the commercial world, it ain't!

Thank you @Mark Ingram. This brings some clarity, although I had to look up the word clamour.
The team is not really interested in doing this right now, and you're happy with the spoils of the current markets. There's generally no interest in a crowd source either, because the team is not confident that the spoils of the Linux market would remain interesting after a theoretical crowdfund. The proverbial banana would be 20.000 people showing up here suggesting that Affinity for Linux would be a lovely idea.
TL;DR: Not now, maybe later.

Hello @Mark Ingram,
Thank you for your post and information.
I've recently published : 
And I have a request for you and your team that implies a very small dev effort.
Would it be possible to add a simple toggle info to our accounts (serif accounts, not forum) to add our targeted OS ?
Example, I would love to have my purchases count as towards Linux platform not Windows. Since you already implicitly do that for Windows / Mac OS, it would be nice to have an explicit button to indicate for Windows purchases that they are used by mainly Linux user.

I know how complicated it can be to get real meaningful stats. And with such a topic, you might even end with bots or false positives, people that would never actually buy your product. Have a little chat with your Marketing & Business team, but I think that metric could actually help. And even if you don't do anything with it, I would actually feel pretty great about it

I got this idea from Steam itself. When a user on Linux purchase a Windows game, it might or might not work on Linux, but that doesn't matter, Valve is counting it as a Linux purchase, and seriously that is awesome. Because that's a proper metric to have that reflects reality.

With that, have an amazing day, keep up the good work ! I can't wait to try publisher, don't get me wrong, I love Scribus, but I was used to indesign, and your tools are simply AWESOME. This is why I vote with my wallet and keep purchasing your products.

Note 1: I am absolutely against the crowdfunding, this is not the way to go for a closed source project. If you want to go that route, let us vote with our wallet and purchase a Linux version with no promise of delivery, right on your page next to the other ones.

Note 2: People speaking about Akira... That project is a splendid demo on how NOT to do a modern design tool, specially in the Linux eco-system.
No cross platform, uses a specific tech that very few devs work on (VALA) and is not desktop agnostic. Just that should be a show stopper for anyone with a little love for all the diversity that exists in the Linux eco-system.
In addition to that : No proper feature set, no roadmap, no real activity in their code base (all branches included). https://github.com/akiraux/Akira .
TLDR: doing it right is not easy, and asking for money is not enough.

Want a good example on how to do it right ? Krita.org and their MANY successful crowdfunding. 
- 2014:  20k Euros (Accelerate dev) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source-digital-painting-accelerate-deve
- 2015:  30.5k Euros (Let's make it faster) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free-paint-app-lets-make-it-faster-than-phot
- 2016:  38.5k Euros (New text, new vector tools. svg2 support, etc.) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-2016-lets-make-text-and-vector-art-awesome
- 2018 : 27k Euros (Squash bugs) https://krita.org/en/fundraising-2018-campaign/ 

That's 116k Euros in 4 years of crowdfunding (and I most certainly forget some others they did). This doesn't included direct donations or steam purchases.
That's how you ask for money, your first build something great, then you lay down a great plan for growing up and then you ask for money.

The second post on this thread from @TonyB said:
Now, that was in 2014, and as the products have grown (and new products like iPad and Publisher have arrived), that cost will have risen, unfortunately.
This thread is popular, but ultimately we've only had a fraction of a percent of people request a Linux version so far. Now, if this post had 20,000 people in it, we'd be clamouring to build for Linux...
We're not saying never, we're just saying that our limited resources are best spent working on other things right now.
And I say all that as a Linux fan.

Me too  without dedicated hardware from DaVinci though. Mainly for color grading.I don't mind the occasional frame drop from non-quattro nVidia cards for this purpose.

Just pre-ordered the affinity publisher. (I'm using scribus atm.)
I am a proud owner of all your products. Right now I use a VM with VFIO (I share GPU, mouse, keyboard, wacom tablet to a windows vm) to use those products.
It's far from ideal, but I am willing to support Serif, because you are actually building amazing products that are very nice to use !
This post is simply to share my support on something happening someday on the linux support front. Whatever it is.
Hope all the posts and repeated questions don't get too much on your nerves. I'm a Software Engineer also, and I know how "Support" can be a hard thing to do properly.
Concerning your choice of technologies, some are questionable, but I'm sure your CTO knows what he is doing. You are invested in .NET, try having a look at .NET core 3 it also supports WPF and other things that can be installed on all platforms and architectures.
https://github.com/dotnet/wpf
https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/release-notes/3.0/preview/3.0.0-preview5.md

@Redsandro Thanks for the recap post, it saved me a lot of reading.
Additional note, I'm a happy user of Davinci Resolve on Linux, and because of their entreprise support on Linux, I'm now moving my equipment and capture cards to theirs instead.
My company is by no means large enough to sponsor such a development on your side. But happy to help if you want more info.

Best regards,

For anyone who's been to a music gig in the last five years.
 

Hi all!! Full Affinity Designer, I hope you enjoy!!

wireframe this art  :)

Hi, guys!
 
I just finished following this free tutorial. And I must say I really enjoyed doing it. Here is my version of it.
 
Best regards! :)

Hello everyone,
 
So even with the latest beta that you just uploaded, I am still able to reproduce the issue and lock me out of affinity designer.
 
Steps to reproduce ( WARNING: This will make your A.D. unusable! ) :
WARNING 2: Now even after reinstall, delete of all folder including AppData's affinity one, the software will crash all the time!
- Unzip my file & Open AD
- Import swatches
- Import icons (assets)
- Try to open the affinity design file "palette"

You will have the crash message, once you restart the app you will have the same message again.
 
Hope you can do something, I have many crashes with affinity designer while using swatches + assets, most of the time it leads to AD being unusable and me having to delete the designer app folder which is a huge pain...
 
Best regards
 
PS: ( This happens on every single version I could get my hands on. )
EDIT:
Included the crash report.
Material-Design-Colors-Swatches-Icons-Palette.zip
f1f6061d-3043-4221-b9a9-e343643b98f3.dmp
test.afdesign

Hello Chris B,

Yes, I know they are doing their best :)
I really hope the software and the QA will improve with all the feedback you receive because affinity serif products are really nice.

Best regards

Hello Chris,
 
RivaTuner and Msi Afterburner are only installed on my main machine, not on the other ones
But I'll gave a try with/without on my main machine.

Hello everyone,
 
So even with the latest beta that you just uploaded, I am still able to reproduce the issue and lock me out of affinity designer.
 
Steps to reproduce ( WARNING: This will make your A.D. unusable! ) :
WARNING 2: Now even after reinstall, delete of all folder including AppData's affinity one, the software will crash all the time!
- Unzip my file & Open AD
- Import swatches
- Import icons (assets)
- Try to open the affinity design file "palette"

You will have the crash message, once you restart the app you will have the same message again.
 
Hope you can do something, I have many crashes with affinity designer while using swatches + assets, most of the time it leads to AD being unusable and me having to delete the designer app folder which is a huge pain...
 
Best regards
 
PS: ( This happens on every single version I could get my hands on. )
EDIT:
Included the crash report.
Material-Design-Colors-Swatches-Icons-Palette.zip
f1f6061d-3043-4221-b9a9-e343643b98f3.dmp
test.afdesign

Tut tut.   ;)
 
There will be more snapping options soon for this kind of thing.  It is a delicate balance though - which is why fine snapping control has been restricted to the Node tool.  The reason being that the Select/Move tool deals with whole objects, and their bounds.  So snapping on those properties makes sense (to me at least).  If I select a complex object and had snapping to geometry points on, you get a LOT of fighting.  I have tested it in the past - and so we ended up with Node tool snapping, since that's where you deal with actual points.
 
We do also offer snapping to Key points.  For Shape layers, this provides additional snapping points that may also help.  I may need to look at this again though if the shape doesn't provide suitable points.

Oh no, the best idea is to use a triangular grid of appropriate size … all snapping problems gone …  :D
I guess, Ben is going to be mad at me, since I did not suggest this in the first place … LOL …  ;)

Yes, there does not seem to be a snapping functionality when using the Move Tool. But the Node Tool works … have a look at my video (I updated my first version after having thought about this). At first, convert the shapes to curves. Then use this algorithm:
Click one honeycomb with the node tool Type Cmd + A (all nodes of the hexagon will get selected) Shift + Click the second one Snap the first onto the second The bad thing is we cannot use the power duplicate here …  :(
Cheers, Alex  :)
Fast_Honeycomb_Algorithm.mov