Frozen Death Knight

People are being way too antsy over nothing. 2.6 will be here when it's here. Personally I am glad that the devs are taking some extra time releasing it, since hard pushing everything out the door will give you results like 2.5, which had a lot of issues and even some regressions in terms of missing functionality like the inability to switch back to the old Pencil Tool drawing algorithm for specific needs. Having a faster major patch cadence than once a year like V1 is still appreciated, but the patch model of every 2 months for V2 is to me way too little time to get a good quality major patch released. They need at least 4-5 months in the oven if you want the 2.X releases to be good at release. As for the Canva acquisition not speeding development up after 4-5 months, we likely won't be seeing any substantial changes to Affinity development within the 1st year of the acquisition. Also, summer just ended. You know, high season for people taking vacation? Do people expect all employees to work full time over Christmas as well, or is it going to break some people's trust that your favourite software isn't being developed in a sweat shop with no breaks? Anyway, looking forward to testing 2.6 once it comes out.

I have yet to get Affinity to work through Wine on Linux Mint (a pretty solid distro), but I was also trying to install the latest version instead of the recommended 2.0. Even if it did work, it is more trouble than it's worth. By far the most cumbersome process I have had to deal with with any software on Linux. Luckily a lot of the other software I use regularly work out of the box natively or has a Wine/Proton version that works. Being a 3D modeller on Linux is pretty nice honestly. If you like to paint I think Krita might be the better option at this stage. There are some really solid features that don't exist in Affinity, but there are of course things Krita can't do as well like more advanced image editing, not to mention performance being a lot stronger in Affinity across the board (vector graphics are very limited and image transforms are less performant) although Krita is pretty solid for painting specifically. Krita does however have a bunch of plug-in support like certain AI stuff, which can be nice for just generating references and such. Having access to an animation timeline is nice. Been trying the experimental builds for Gimp and while it is showing some promise, it is not there yet.

Yep. Besides, it's not like Serif couldn't just add a permission feature to an Affinity Flatpak install for Linux specifically. Accessing all the folders is only one line of code if you want to give full permission in the Terminal, so I doubt it would be hard to implement if they did decide to make a Linux version. This issue has been solved on mobile phones where every app is asking you on start-up if you want grant it access to features such as the camera, microphone, etc., so I don't see how Flatpaks are any different from that. Not to mention that Flatseal is very, very easy to use. It is literally a button switch if you want to enable or disable permissions to your system with the most complex thing being if you only want the software to access only specific folder structures for the sake of extra security, something that only advanced users would do. Copy-pasting the folder directory into Flatseal is however not complicated.

Flatpaks do allow you to break the software out of its containment by giving it permission to work outside of the sandbox. You can do this either through the Terminal or through a Flatpak installation of Flatseal, which lists all Flatpaks installed on your PC and also allows you to give permission to access other parts of your PC folder structure (see the Filesystem section in this image). In the case of Affinity assuming it was a Flatapk, as long as you give permission for the folders where the images are located, linking them into your document should not cause any issues. I know this because I have been doing these edits myself with Flatseal for other software such as browsers and Discord. Unless you give permission you can't just drag and drop files into those programs, so you have to override that manually yourself, just to give an example.

Just going to point out that when Affinity was Mac only I wanted a Windows version, as did a lot of other people. When the Windows version was added I paid for it and became a customer. Were we all "religious fanatics" for wanting to use a software on the platform we desired? Or was it because it was practical because we happened to use Windows? Extend that same logic to wanting a Linux version and it becomes ridiculous to paint everyone as religious zealots for wanting to run a piece of software on an operating system of choice. Do people not realise how asinine that sounds? This entire conversation is being extremely unproductive, especially when one side is accusing the other of things that just aren't true.

The issue I am having is that I like to mix raster and vector art a ton. Vectors are great for filling in line art and having high quality silhouettes where you can do a lot of little tweaks here and there while you paint inside of the silhouette. It's a great workflow. Though, the fact of the matter is that it is just easier to hand paint silhouettes with raster brushes than doing it with the vector tools (especially since there are no blob brushes or pure vector brushes in Affinity), hence the use of very basic auto-tracing being better than having nothing at all. For instance, I can't use the Vector Fill Tool on raster lineart, so having auto-trace would allow me to use the Photo tools instead for that purpose. Having a solid auto-trace feature with advanced features would definitely be fantastic, but my use cases just require the bare minimum for this feature to make working between Photo and Designer really comfortable. Going into Inkscape to copy+paste my silhouette drawings there to convert to vectors and then copy+paste back into Affinity are a few too many steps to not be worth it as of now.

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/microsoft-patches-tpm-20-bypass-to-prevent-windows-11-installs-on-pcs-with-unsupported-cpus Somewhat related to the discussion about some Windows users moving over to Linux, looks like there will be a lot of PCs forced to switch to Linux in the future or they will be put in landfills eventually. If it is correct that Windows 11 no longer supports anything below Intel gen 10 CPUs in terms of power that means that practically all PCs built in the 2010s are incapable of running Windows 11. Yikes.

Acting like a politician with non-answers is doing you no favours. Just saying.

Gaslighting won't work. You just want to be right no matter what.

No, you absolutely did not.

Extremely ironic considering how emotionally invested you have been about this topic. I am only invested in having the software I want to use where I want to use it. You have yet to explain anything of what I have been asking you. Still waiting. You never bothered having a conversation in the first place. I've been addressing as many points as possible yet you have ignored practically all of it yourself. It is just as well to dismiss anything you say altogether since you bring nothing to the table that can be discussed. A lot of work that is being done as we speak. A lot of software and hardware are already working and even more will be working in the future. For my own personal use cases Affinity is the only thing left for me to get to work on Linux.

Trends matter. A constantly growing market share means that it has further potential for growth. Why do you think people dedicate their lives to the stock market by chasing trends no matter how "small" they may seem at first? Predicting trends before they happen can make people rich as well as avoid financial disasters. Microsoft losing any ground at all to any of its Windows competitors like MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, etc. is not something they desire, no matter how "small" it is. Do you think Microsoft are happy about Windows 10 being nearly 2 times as popular as Windows 11 and losing some market share for the latter even by a small fraction? Absolutely not. Growth is healthy. Stagnant decline is not. That's how companies think when they see those numbers. According to one source I could find there are roughly 1,5 billion PCs in the world right now connected to the internet. Doing some quick math would net every 1% of market share to roughly 15 million PCs as of now. 4,45% of 1,5 billion is roughly 66,75 million PCs running Linux on the desktop. The Linux PC market grew by roughly 15-30 million PCs in the span of 1-2 years based on this rough math. Just to put the numbers into perspective, the Nintendo Switch sold about 16 million consoles so far this fiscal year and it's on the way to become one of the best selling consoles of all time. https://wifitalents.com/statistic/personal-computer/#:~:text=Over 1.5 billion personal computers,PC market grew by 11.9%. The numbers of course have a bunch of errors because of the imprecise math, but one fact remains. Just 1% market share is a lot of PCs. If Linux market share keeps growing and the amount of available PC hardware keeps growing, the numbers of Linux PCs won't be that insignificant regardless of how much bigger Windows is.

The earliest I could find on that website where it was at 4% and above was in february 2024, this year. Previous year it was around the 2-3% mark. I've checked multiple times and unless you have some other data to show, you are simply wrong. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-201501-202407 "You don't understand it" is not an argument. You have not given me any reason for why I should trust that you understand it either. You provide no explanation on how it even works and the one thing you gave me wasn't even conclusive. I know perfectly well that Windows runs on ARM. That wasn't what the debate article was even about. The fact that ARM is also supported on Linux shouldn't be feasible according to Tanenbaum since he made the argument that Linux was not "future proof", but yet it is supported. Where is the flaw if Linux can be built to support other types of modern hardware? Explain. That is why I am asking you. Also why I don't trust you since you don't provide any explanations.

The trend is upward regardless of the cycles. I frankly don't care about the "next big thing", since I hold no such delusions. The fact of the matter is that it is growing. MacOS is "only" 15,57% right now yet you wouldn't call MacOS an insignificant platform. Growing by a couple of percentages in a couple of years is nothing to sneeze at when there are many millions of hardware out there whether it's PCs, phones, handhelds, etc. Smaller platforms than Windows get support from developers regardless, so a growing platform like Linux is relevant. Since you can't be bothered to link any specific source explaining what the debate was even about, I guess I will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate If all the information in here is correct, the entire debate can basically be boiled down to Tanenbaum arguing that Linux at the time not being able to support more processor architectures than x86, which has been and continues to be the most common desktop processors out there for desktops. The reason he had was that his MINIX system was built around "microkernels" rather than a "monolithic kernel" that does everything. The article on Wikipedia even concludes: Which from what I understand is correct. Linux does support more hardware than x86. It also supports more modern architecture like ARM processors. The flaw Tanenbaum was arguing about was based on two fundamentally different ideas on how to design the core of an operating system. Because of multiple different factors Linux ended up being the more popular choice over MINIX. Nothing in here however provides concrete evidence that Linux is fundamentally flawed beyond some comments from someone else who claims that microkernels are safer, whatever that means exactly I don't know. I don't see anything in here about Linus Torvalds changing his mind about this. Heck, I found the direct opposite where he argues the strengths of the monolithic kernel system he built. So what am I supposed to make of this exactly? Shall I just take your word as gospel truth when you can't even make a compelling argument for why Linux is fundamentally flawed except saying so? Even after I read the material the two men in question didn't change their minds on their stances and even so have no ill will against each other for disagreeing. I can only come to the conclusion that you are being intellectually lazy by not providing any explanations except telling me to read up on it. Well I did, so now what?

The current 4,45% number is yet another data point showing that Linux is growing more and more upward for the last couple of years. In the early 2010s that number was below 1% and even close to 0% the decade before that. A couple of years ago it was around 2%. The trend is showing an increasingly growing market share and not a stagnant one. Meanwhile the trend for Windows 11 was stagnant and even shrank while Windows 10 grew, which would suggest that users are sticking to Windows 10 and/or moving over to Linux rather than mass adopting Windows 11. The data may not be definite proof, but it is the best we have. It just isn't supporting your argument that the platform is fundamentally flawed for desktop use. Microsoft were also well known to use underhanded tactics to mess with the competition during the 90s while also producing industry leading software for home desktops. Linux also found its own niche that made it useful like for server infrastructure and other things, which is why it's still relevant today. Only Apple really had what it took to compete with Microsoft at that time for the PC desktop market. Don't know anything about your specific example, but an example that old frankly has very little to do with the current state of personal computing, especially when PC users don't really get any options at all to choose from besides not having any OS pre-installed when you let a PC workshop build your PC for you (I have both hired someone to build one of my PCs and built my latest one myself). I have so far never been given a choice of what comes pre-installed with any piece of hardware I ever bought, especially not the operating system. The tech industry has no reason to give you that choice either, hence why we have situations like Alphabet breaking anti-trust laws because Google comes as the default search engine for practically everything nowadays, among other anti-competitive practices. Expecting Linux to dominate the market is foolish with the current circumstances, that I can agree with. As for it being fundamentally flawed, please explain then why some industry software are perfectly able to run on Linux if it is that flawed? Why would Valve build their Steam Deck infrastructure on Linux if it doesn't fundamentally work?