Ruslik

Well, personally I'm all hands for deep understanding and continuous learning, but we have to be real here. I's not possible to know everything about everything. It's like developers don't have to know to much about psychology of colours, visual hierarchy, golden ratio, grid systems etc. when his position is database engineer, its good for him to know about this things, but it is not required for doing his job. The same stuff applies to designer positions, employers don't require deep architectural knowledge from someone who has different area of expertise. Division of labor, my man. Anyways it's got way off topic. It was pleasure to chat with you guys. Serif team, keep rocking. Hope to see your beautiful software on Linux some day. Cheers.

I'm not arguing about that. We sure can write everything in assembler but we as human beings work better on much higher abstractions. We are talking here about designing something not developing, about rapid prototyping, about availability of tools to designers and people who tend to be more productive in creative environment. Not everybody know how to code neither it should be required to contribute to a product creation. Look at an explosion of Sketch for example, why is it became so popular all of the sudden, why people not designing in code? Why Affinity Designer introduced symbols and other tools for responsive design and UI design? What if someone has to design products for multiple platforms (Android, IOS etc.) do you think it is possible to learn all platform specific APIs and tools just to design user interface? Sure, try to tell that to a UI designer who has some kind of graphic design degree, he/she sure will appreciate such approach

While I'm sure all of this products are great, there are definitely no native solutions like Affinity Designer, Sketch, Adobe XD. Because UI design is not only about web design, there are mobile apps, desktop apps and many other platforms where "handcoded" approach is not suitable and even not possible. There is definitely demand but no great solution yet in the Linux land, or I'm not aware of one.

Again many of your points may be purely subjective. GIMP - maybe too different from Photoshop but it doesn't mean it is not capable of something Photoshop is. It is a matter of familiarity and practice. Printer drivers, I can't say to that, but again, it can be the case where you have to dig a little bit to solve your particular case. Yeah I'm not aware of a good UI design software on Linux, that's why this thread is born, I think. There is some cross platform (Web based) developings in this area (Gravit Designer, Vectr) and I hope they can deliver good results in terms of performance, but competition is always good for customer, plus Affinity is not web based product and could provide better performance/usability experience in theory. Cheers.

Well I personally believe that it's not a good solution to fork/create such tool that would abstract other OS', as it would be too general to be able to provide satisfactory experience. Software vendors couldn't provide support, debug bug reports easily as problems may lay in "wine/alternative" itself. It would be pretty challenging to develop universal abstraction that could cover all edge cases etc. etc. Again it's my personal feeling, I can't actually talk about Wine in particular, as I don't really know much about it. Maybe someone actually creating something like this, you never know. Well it depends on what you consider professional software. Look at Krita for example, that is a beautiful piece of software, and many artists are using it professionally. It is raster graphics editor so it does not provide what Affinity Designer does, but still many many people use it happily. Blender is another pretty complex 3D editor and I'm sure there is much more. About licensing, again I can't speak what can or can't be a factor to licensing change. As an example take a look at regional lock downs on some media resources (music, tv shows etc.) I doubt that money is the only reason here (maybe it is). And this kind of unpredictability is not good for someone to build a business around "wine competitor". As to point 3. It is really hard to provide usable experience through emulation, especially to so sophisticated and critical piece of software as graphics editor. Anyway I don't want to debate about how good or bad Linux is for someone, it is very subjective. I just want to +1 for adding support for it in the future and wish you all guys/gals well. P.S. Sorry for my English it is not my native language

As to Wine, as far as I understand: 1. It is an open source project, developed by community. 2. It is often against the license to run commercial software with something like Wine. 3. It is always better to have native support.

I don't really understand all this arguing from some users about how bad, unusable Linux is for them particularly, it is always great to have a chose, whether you want to use something commercial with its pros and cons or something free in GNU sense. Anyway that is not the point of this thread. The main thing here is, is it financially profitable, meaningful for Serif as a company to introduce Linux support in short or long run. That's why a crowdfunding is an option here, I guess. From user stand point we all really should be interested in different platforms support, as we don't know how our position may change tomorrow.

OMG, this thread. Guys I understand that everyone have opinions about how suitable or advanced Linux distros are, for developers, designers or average Affinity products customers, but that all is very subjective and can't be defined without proper market research. So please stop arguing about your subjective experiences, that is not helpful nor productive. What could be done to effectively identify interest of the community and investment of development resources from Affinity team, is to start crowdfunding campaign and see if there is potential. There is no risk for both parties. Affinity can start if there is enough interest, and customers can be assured that Affinity, as a company is able to deliver. One point about popularity of Linux from designers community, can be a "chicken and egg" problem. It's hard to convert to Linux without proper software solutions, and it's hard to invest in ecosystem without customer base.