Frozen Death Knight

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?

This point of yours doesn't mean anything. There are professionals who neither use Photoshop or Affinity Photo and are even relying on open source software to do the work. Are those people no longer professional? Unless you actually mention something specific that certain professionals need (emphasis on certain and not all professionals) and is missing in Affinity this doesn't mean anything. There are professionals that do use Affinity instead of Adobe or even use both. A software doesn't need to cover all the bases to be a professional tool, but it also doesn't hurt if it can. Improving the tool to cover as many needs as possible that a professional might use is a goal that's constantly moving and should be strived for. Here's a fact, Linux is lacking in image editing software, period. Doesn't matter if it is "professional" or not, there aren't many alternatives besides using Darktable, Inkscape, Gimp, and Krita. Commercial software exist on the platform, but not on the image editing front.

The solution is to have a standard and stick to it if it is that important. If everything needs to be PSD at all times then it means you have to use Photoshop, since Adobe are the ones responsible for the file format and own it. The competition only support PSD because they have to. If only the final product needs to be PSD then any software that supports PSD works. Only Photopea does what you want and I very much doubt your team would be fine using that over anything else. Expecting another program like Affinity to build its foundations on something it has zero control over is never going to happen. PSD is Adobe, so if you truly want to cut all ties with Adobe you must abandon PSD and build your work on some other open source standard with equivalent features as PSD (which does not exist) or embrace another ecosystem like Affinity. You could also try making your own file format and make that the industry standard. Way harder to do, but hey, anything's possible if you are stubborn enough.

Well, it's basically a no win scenario if you want a Linux version then. Support Affinity on a different platform, but you won't get a Linux version because you bought it on a different platform. Don't support Affinity at all until a Linux version is available, but then you aren't a customer and thus the devs are not interested in you. Personally I would listen to people who are already paying customers if I was a dev. Those people have already proven that they will support your business by putting money on the table before, so they will likely do so again. I've invested into Affinity in more ways than most that the devs are fully aware of and I'll gladly pay for it again if it means I get to work on my preferred platform. I have however started moving my painting process over to Krita as a result of not being able to use Affinity on Linux. I still dual boot occasionally when I absolutely need to use Affinity, but there is less guarantee of that in the coming years. People like I dropped Adobe in the past, so dropping Affinity for alternatives are not out of the question.

Verkar som det.

Interesting. Maybe it's related to right-to-left languages and other Eastern languages that was teased about some time ago? I recall a dev saying that adding that feature would require a hefty rewrite of their text engine.

Jasså jaha säger du. Let's just keep our feet on the ground. Though, I am curious what's going on since the wait time between 2.5 and 2.6 has been significantly longer than previous Betas. I suppose things are moving quite rapidly behind the scenes after the acquisition with new employees, work relations with Canva employees, and more. That being all said, I can't help but dream of a Linux port announcement, hehe.

The size of your userbase is not directly related to company growth both in terms of revenue and on the stock market. For example, Blizzard have lost millions of subscribers in World of WarCraft over the years, but in terms of revenue WoW has never been more profitable because of in-game transactions. That being said, we don't have much data on how many decided to drop Adobe and what the user market looks like. Regardless, Adobe most certainly did lose business with a bunch of creators over the decisions surrounding AI and the scraping of user content. As for how many were lost that is more up in the air, but when long time professionals have started to look for and even promote alternatives to Adobe, then it's starting to look pretty bad. People who built their careers on specific software don't usually stop using them on a whim, so having some of your most dedicated users jump ship is never a good sign. Adobe burnt practically all their good will with their core customers, so even those who still have to use their products are way more likely to try other products until something equivalent or better pops up. Just within my personal social circle and the content creators I follow online I have seen more and more people recommending and using alternatives like Affinity, Krita, Davinci Resolve, etc. It's not just some fringe groups that's for sure. As for how commercially viable Linux is, there already are commercial markets in the creative fields such as CGI. Though, those same companies also have Windows and/or Mac available to run Adobe products, since the alternatives are Krita and Gimp on Linux. Still, Linux is not all just open source and there are businesses that rely on Linux for work. There is always risk involved when developing software for any platform, but those risks are also being vastly over-exaggerated for Linux since both software and hardware support have become significantly easier than just 5+ years ago. Heck, making a full Linux port of Affinity may not even be necessary by using alternative and cheaper methods like officially supporting Steam/Proton/Wine/etc., so there are ways to vastly reduce most negative risks of developing for the platform. It's not like they can't afford it at this stage.

Yeah, I know it wasn't the direct fault of Microsoft and Windows specifically. It's not like Mac and Linux are immune to things breaking down. That being said, considering all the other controversies that Microsoft have had just this year, having your flagship product completely break across the world that causes billions in damages will reflect poorly on them regardless of them having no part in it. The timing couldn't have been worse. Sadly the vast majority of people are technologically illiterate, so it won't matter if it was all CrowdStrike's fault to these people. I personally won't blame Microsoft for this when the reality is that this incident was inevitable because of people's over-reliance on technology and how patch updates are nowadays forced upon you across a lot of software. Not the first or last time things have broken down. The big difference is the sheer scale of it. The true lesson from this should be to have backup systems that aren't tied to the current PC internet infrastructure we have built for ourselves whenever possible (i.e. hospitals). Also, having forced updates are a really, really bad idea and should especially not be pushed across the entire world at once like what was done with CrowdStrike. Having smaller patch rollouts to see if everything works before patching elsewhere needs to be standard procedure if you want to avoid this blunder from ever happening again.

On a slightly related note, Windows is making headlines for basically crashing infrastructure across the entire world right now due to a faulty patch update done by CrowdStrike that had faulty file formating. Linux and Mac are unaffected. Microsoft just can't catch a break with bad PR this year. XD

Which is why one of the simplest solutions is to just port Affinity to Steam. Valve are doing a lot of that work just out of their own best interest by building Proton and contributing to Wine directly, so putting the entire suite on Steam would add another incentive for Valve to add those missing dependencies while Canva/Serif don't have to lift a finger beyond maintaining their own software for their already existing platforms. There are next to no downsides besides Valve taking a pay cut for hosting the software on their platform and them having to sell both the Mac and Windows versions together instead of separately like it's done now, but the upsides are many since then Affinity can be built for the Steam infrastructure that is working on making everything be able to run on Linux out of the box. Not to mention that Steam is just a massive marketplace so it will just boost the sales of their software on both Mac and Windows. That being said, I wouldn't call it a waste of time considering that Serif are no longer that little independent company competing against the behemoth of Adobe. They can now easily afford doing a proper port and build their team to support a full on native Linux version while still adding tons of new features if they so desired. It's just a matter of willingness from the top to invest those resources and also if it is worth doing it over just supporting Linux through compatibility layers which are a much cheaper and faster method. Having a bit of customer support for running it on Linux with compatibility layers isn't really asking for much considering the size of Canva.

After having used Affinity for over half a decade, I think one of the most unnecessary design decisions for Affinity is the lack of both the Crop Tool and Artboard Tool in Designer and Photo. As someone who owns and runs all three software constantly, it really doesn't make sense from a workflow point of view that I can't create either cropped canvases or artboards in either Persona when both are used constantly for vector and raster work. When I build raster GUI art or have to iterate upon designs of my art the Artboard Tool is fantastic for being able to do so in Photo. In Designer I sometimes only need to work on a single canvas and have a simple need to readjust the size of it on the fly, which is currently more complicated than just using Crop Tool in Photo. What's funny is that you can bypass this restriction by creating artboard assets and drop them into your document while using Photo without even owning Designer, so it is just adding unnecessary steps for what is very common workflow in equivalent software such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Please, just make both tools available in both programs. I can understand not wanting the other vector and raster tools in both Personas, but editing your canvas size and adding artboards are pretty universal and agnostic workflow enhancements that just make sense to have.

Snap packages and some of its other forced on features are what make Ubuntu controversial. From my understanding Snaps are somewhat slower than other packaging methods and Flatpaks are now seen as the future going forward for making software able to run on basically any Linux distro out of the box, thus making Ubuntu the black sheep. Flatpaks aren't fully flawless either, but when the format solves so many technical issues it makes Ubuntu's refusal to support it a pretty big downside. Linux Mint basically removed all of Ubuntu's controversial features and has focused a lot on making Linux approachable to people like I who have been running Windows practically my entire life. I was able to get a lot of the basics running in a couple of hours of installing, with only audio being a massive issue until I found a solution that works perfectly for my home studio. Not having HDR support is one feature I've come to miss, but I'd rather have a stable workstation than an experimental one that can potentially break. At least the Mint team seems dedicated and they are working on adding Wayland support for Cinnamon and Pipewire for audio production (which solved my issue by manually installing it), so the distro is keeping up with the latest trends at least.

From what I understand GNOME based desktops are the most like MacOS with some Linux distros likes Zorin OS apparently being pretty similar to Mac out of the box. Ubuntu can apparently be customised to behave more like MacOS like this video explains it. That being said, I know that Linux Mint Cinnamon can be modified to have some similarities to MacOS, like the close/maximise/minimise buttons being in the left upper corner instead of the right one and more. Ubuntu seems like a pretty safe bet for you however.

I'm running Linux Mint personally. It's basically a branch off of Ubuntu, which is branched off of Debian. The Debian tree of Linux is pretty stable, well documented, and has a bunch of software support out of the box, so a lot of solutions you find within that family tree will likely work on either distro if you need to find solutions. To best explain the main differences between Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and PopOS (another branch off of Ubuntu) it would be that there are different packages for installing software on some of them (i.e. Mint and the rest use Flatpaks that are more universal across most Linux distributions and Snap being proprietary to Ubuntu), the desktop environments being run on different infrastructures, and how much community driven vs commercially driven each are. Ubuntu is the most commercial one because of its own proprietary systems and having some telemetry features that are luckily opt in. It also looks and behaves a bit closer to Mac than it does Windows. Linux Mint is more community driven that strives for a smooth experience moving from Windows to Linux, which is why it looks and behaves a lot like it out of the box, thus making it an excellent jumping on point for trying out Linux. PopOS is also a popular community driven choice that is a bit more modern looking while doing some of its own thing. Debian is basically as vanilla Linux as you can get and is community driven as well. Just remember that picking a distro family is more important than the individual distro, but because of the nature of Linux you can install and customise any of these Linux distros to your liking, even going so far as to make one look and behave like another if you know what you are doing. I would suggest trying Linux Mint Cinnamon if you are a Windows user, but nothing wrong with trying Ubuntu either. It is the most popular Linux distro after all regardless of some controversies surrounding it over the years.

RTL support was on the list of priorities since around last year when Serif did an interview and mentioned it. Designer is fairly popular in Japan so it became an incentive to improve it. I think I recall it being mentioned as well when Canva acquired Serif, so it's likely only a matter of time.

Well, there are a lot of PCs out there that won't even be able to run Windows 11 even if people wanted to. Either they will need to be thrown into a dump (which would be stupid if they still work), or they will have to install Linux once Windows 10 becomes too unstable. I know which option I would take if I was a casual user at least. Heck, even though I have no issues running Windows 11 I would rather skip that release entirely rather than force myself to use something that is worse than Windows 10 in a lot of ways. As for the professional field, yes, there is definitely a market for it on Linux. I personally know a few professionals who use Linux, one guy being from India who works in the animation industry and has done work for big companies such a Disney. He told me that besides a couple of PCs that run Windows because of Photoshop, everything else is run on Linux only. They all use Gimp and/or Krita because those are the only options available for their regular workstations while they do CG work in Substance, Maya, Blender, Houdini, etc. Pretty sure these companies would invest in Affinity licenses if the software were available on Linux and offered better features than the open source alternatives, which in regards to Gimp I would definitely say would be a massive upgrade. So the market is out there. It's mostly a matter of being able to reach out and make sure the products are solid for production work.

It doesn't. Tried it multiple times and it is not able to run the latest version of V2. From what I learned from a coder I know who helped me out during install, there are some Windows dependencies that aren't available on Linux which makes it significantly harder if not impossible as of now to run Affinity through Wine like a regular software. Also, even if it did work there is no guarantee for it to work long terms, which is why having official Linux support would be crucial for the longevity of using Affinity. I suggest sending feedback to Canva through those links I posted on the last page about Linux support for Affinity. It's the best opportunity we have as of now.

Yeah, I fixed it now. I copied the text directly from that YouTube comment and somehow the link had YouTube URLs built into the links.

I found this comment on one of Canva's videos. So here are the links for people who want to contact Canva directly about supporting Linux. canva.com/help/get-in-touch/general-feedback/ m.me/canva canva.com/help This is probably the best opportunity for people using Linux to make our voices heard and that there is in fact a demand for Linux support on Affinity. I'll at least try my best and send my feedback over about there being a need for these products. It would be a shame to have to part with my work software after having used it for the last 7 years.

It would also be nice if the patch documentation was improved. I'm not kidding, there have been multiple times where I have found stealth changes without them even being mentioned in the patch notes. For instance, Affinity was at one point not able to draw straight horizontal and vertical lines while holding down shift, but in a random V1 Beta build that issue was fixed yet still no mention of it in the final release notes. Same thing when the devs added the ability to toggle the modifiers for changing brush size/hardness to changing rotation, spacing, etc. Things have improved since then, but it still happens in V2 that the documentation is insufficient about the improvements that have been made. I hope things continue to improve as to make those blunders a thing of the past. It would be highly appreciated if old bugs like the Windows specific tablet drawing bugs got priority fixes as well. Not being able to draw straight lines without pen pressure being broken all the time is a big hindrance for clean line work. Fixing those would make working so much easier.

@awakenedbyowls If I understand this correctly, there are issues with the basic shortcuts for moving around the canvas after interacting with panels and other non-canvas UI, correct? Also that that the tool isn't being selected on startup of a newly opened file when pressing shortcuts? Have you tried changing the default shortcut for the Zoom Tool to Z for Zoom In and shift+Z for Zoom Out? You can bypass the tool entirely by having direct shortcuts for those actions. Maybe that may help bypass the issue? Also, does Mid click work for you to pan and/or zoom with the mouse scroll wheel? You can key that to a tablet pen as well if you happen to use one of those. It's sometimes a good idea to show visual examples of your issue. Makes it a lot easier for the devs to figure out what is wrong.