MattyWS

you said it yourself, the only thing holding linux back is the need for software... sooo Developers need to make the first step. They always have. There were no windows users before developers made software for windows. There were no affinity suite customers until serif made the affinity suite. It's a backwards argument to make that devs shouldn't take the first step.

All successful companies grow over time

I mentioned before that I think Serif and Linux have a lot in common if you compare photoshop vs affinity photo to windows vs linux, so I guess I'd argue here, why did serif even set out to start Affinity knowing the market share they have would be next to nothing compared to photoshop? Serif are very much banking on their target audience seeking out an alternative to photoshop, which is what everyone uses, much like people are seeking out a good alternative to windows, which is what everyone uses. It's a very similar comparison IMO. People Want change from windows for much the same reasons as people want change from photoshop and Serif have been here to help us escape.

No, I just don't like seeing people in this forum going into other peoples requests threads and basically saying they don't want said request to come to fruition because it doesn't affect them directly. Like I said, I don't go round complaining that Serif are so focused on the Mac version of the software when I don't use a mac, why would someone else complain about a linux version just because they don't use linux? It makes no sense to come into this topic with negativity toward the request. I'd go as far as to say it's pretty spiteful and selfish. "I don't edit raw images, why are serif wasting their time on improving that feature when I don't even need it!" You could go as far as to say there's only one major desktop OS, windows. because thats where pretty much every is, right? Who cares about having a mac version, right? Heck why are Serif wasting their time on affinity at all? everyone should just use photoshop, because thats what the majority of people use. Who needs options, right?

This is true for now, however it is a growing market with currently no major competing products and if Serif gets in there early, they're going to be *the* suite of choice for photo editing and design work. Sure you have gimp, krita and inkscape, but gimp is like a special needs little brother of photoshop and krita is mostly for painting... and Inkscape is not the most intuitive software to use. The affinity suite blows these away. Photoshop is nowhere to be seen in this marketplace as well so Serif will pretty much get the only share of profits there and make no mistake, more and more people are choosing Linux as their desktop OS. It is a growing market for sure. I think the problem is that normal people who aren't in the know still think of Linux as the 'programmers and hackers OS' which sounds scary and complicated, but it's actually just a regular OS people can use just fine. Linux as a desktop gaming PC solution has the full support of major companies like Valve. Anyways I think this time next year we will see a huge growth for Linux. the hundreds of distros aside, developing for linux in general means distro can use it (kinda, please serif do not go the route Adobe did with substance designer on linux lol).

Well everyone is entitled to their opinions no matter how wrong. Windows, Mac and Linux are the three major OS's. Linux might be dominant in other areas, like how pretty much the majority of phones, supercomputers and servers are running linux, and in that sense sure you can say "it's not a major desktop OS" in that most people use Windows and the rest of the share goes to Mac then finally Linux... But it's still one of the three major OS's and it runs faster and more secure than windows. Literally the only reason the vast majority use Windows over Linux is; 1) basically all computers that aren't mac come with windows preinstalled and most people aren't bothered about changing their OS 2) most software runs on windows because developers make software for windows, because thats where the majority of users are (which is also partly the reason people stick to windows, it's really unhealthy relationship. Devs dont make software for linux because not many use linux because devs don't make software for linux, which is a stupid cycle) There is nothing Linux can't do that windows can in theory. People *should* be using the fastest, most secure OS (linux), but people just use what they're handed to them which is windows most of the time. Thankfully this is starting to change. Steamdeck and all steam machines run linux, there are a few brands of pc that come preinstalled with linux most notably System76, which is kind of the apple of the linux world https://system76.com/desktops So yea, just because you don't use linux doesn't mean it's not in the running. It *is* used by a lot of people, creatives and developers mostly at the moment, gamers secondly and slowly but surely, every day, non-tech-savvy people. Take a look at POP OS. it comes installed of the system76 computers and it's extremely user friendly, so much so that I'd actually set up my grandma a POP_OS pc than a windows pc. It's far more user friendly than windows, far more secure than windows, far *faster* than windows, can do all the normal, every day things people need just like windows can, but without the telemetry and bloatware. The only thing holding Linux back in this case is that developers for niche stuff like what we do need to start developing software for us to use on linux. Anyway, your comment doesn't help anyone. If you don't use Linux and you don't have a need for affinity photo on linux fine, just don't make anti-comments. I don't use Mac OS but I'm not going to sit here and complain that Serif are wasting time on the Mac version of the software even though like 90% of people use windows. Linux support is being requested because people want it.

It's much like Photopea I suppose, though I really *really* don't want to have to use photoshop in web browser just because adobe and affinity are being equally stubborn about supporting only 2/3 of the major OS's. It's sad that affinity doesn't even work through wine... I do have a question for the affinity staff though, what would it take for you guys to be convinced that Linux is a good platform for affinity suite?

I think it's a stretch to say it's dead. we do need to have the ability to edit channels but the affinity devs are notoriously stubborn when you're wrong about stuff, seem to really double down/ignore feedback... But the software is still nice and it can still mostly replace photoshop. I've just started doing channel packing in substance designer instead. It's a faf that I cant use Affinity but if the devs want to go out of their way to make the software awkward to use them what you gunna do?

What nBlaze said. I'm not talking about Windows being unhealthy to use, I'm talking about the OS being filled with floatware *from microsoft*, the fact that they have several versions of software that do the same things (settings... the snipping tool+snip&sketch, random other junk). If you look in the windows store you'll see theres a bunch of stuff including *games* already installed, and some stuff isn't removable. I don't want MS edge, I want to remove it but that shit keeps appearing still. You don't have the control you want over your OS with windows and more importantly Microsoft will scrape every little bit of data out of your usage of their OS. Some services are so reliant on MS as well (anyone remember when an MS server went down and stopped the task bar from functioning correctly? wtf). Miss me on that junk. At least with Mac OS you may be limited, but you know what to expect. You know you're a customer because Apple sells hardware and trust as opposed to MS which needs you to use their OS, which is the unhealthy part. Linux is just there for us to use with no bs, Mac is a byproduct of having bought apple hardware, MS's Windows is latching onto their users as hard as facebook is (and no, I don't have a facebook/instagram/whatsapp account, nor a google account). TLDR; windows sucks and we shouldn't be forced to use a different OS of our choice, but sadly this is currently true and only developers like Serif have the power to change that.

yea first thing I did was convert substance via alien, however that *is* a faf and the steam versions do simply just work. I havent tried gaea through wine yet I should try that now !

My reason for jumping ship from Windows to Linux as my daily driver as a 3D artist and gamer is because I don't believe Windows is a healthy OS. much like photoshop, windows is one big legacy bloat, with patches on patches on patches. it's on ship thst still floats because someone keeps nailing boards to the holes. many Linux distros follow a similar path to Mac, in simplicity and efficiency, so in my mind, I quite see some linux distros as a FOSS MacOS. I think Affinity suite would do well investing in Linux because more and more people are realising it's not a scary programmer OS and in most cases things do just work. I'm here playing all my normal games, using blender, substance designer and unity to make my games the same as I did on windows. I even made some notes; So yea, as you can see the only *major* thing missing is something like the affinity suite. I do this professionally and the only thing holding me back on Linux is this, so there's a massive gap in the market here IMO and affinity could be the only premium suite to fill it.

I'm a bit of a linux noob but when I tried Affinity via proton and wine it didn't work. Wine came close in that it opened affinity photo and I could click on some of the buttons but the screen was black with some UI elements showing and it crashed after a couples minutes. Proton didn't open it.

I'm not sure I fully understand but, in cases with VFX textures R G B and A can be used as individual greyscale images that can be used in game engines and such, but also in the case with GUI work in games, applications and TV is that say you have an icon or logo, you'll want to edit the RGB as if there were no transparency, and the A channel would be used in whatever application/shader to create the transparency to avoid any bleeding because depending on how the image gets exported from photoshop/affintiy it could remove colour information from the RGB channels where the alpha channel is pure black, (which is ideally not what anyone wants in this case). Take this texture for example, the person who created this image filled the outer areas with an average green colour and wants that colour information to be retained so the alpha channel in an external application (like unity or unreal) can simply use the alpha channel as a way to mask the area out, but when viewing the texture from a distance the texture will mip out (get smaller in pixel size). if the outside area if this texture was pure black or pure white instead of green, then from a distance you'd get a white or black outline around all your tree leaves. Likewise, the alpha channel may not simply be a black and white mask, it might be a gradient from black to white so the person making the shader can use that to tighten or widen the alpha with the shader. artists and graphic designers need full control over each individual channel for this reason, and each channels information needs to be retained on export. That said I've just decided to do any texture packing in substance designer now because that *does* retain all the information in channels and I can just make seperate greyscale images in affinity photo if need be, save them out as bitmap/whatever and import to designer to pack... it's not super ideal though and not everyone uses substance designer/wants to use another expensive application to do basic stuff like this. thats probably a tangent to what you're talking about though, do you mean to effectively keep affinity photo much the same and just use a 5th channel as the 4th on export? If so this doesn't solve the issue of channels being difficult to work with. I'd say why even have channels exposed in the UI of affinity photo if they aren't meant to be edited?

Affinity Suite is advertised for game development just before anyone says it isn’t. So no one can say affinity isn’t for game devs. It is. And it’s awesome. We love affinity and we want to use it so I think the devs should embrace this.

Massively disagree here. The Affinity suite was marketed toward a few things, like photo editing, illustration, heck making magazines, printing and also game development. I’ve seen Affinity advertised for game development. But that aside, the general idea of affinity photo is literally image manipulation and we can’t really manipulate 1/4th of our images, and it’s pretty sucky trying to edit the other 3/4ths of our images too. I’m talking about channels here, RGBA. We should be able to edit them easily. Currently photoshop does this better but we want to be able to use affinity instead. The pushback is astounding to me because if I were you guys, I’d certainly want to accommodate the entire photoshop target audience.

apart from the background which I found online (and some settings changed like moving the clock to the corner instead of the middle) this is just how POP_OS looks ^^

A +1 here for the Linux crowd. I Main POP!_OS and the only image manipulation applications worthy are Krita and Gimp... A proper package like the affinity line would be a hit IMO. Linux is no longer for the one or two nerds in the crowd, it's becoming more and more mainstream. If the developers need a reason, I would like to use Affinity as an example. Windows is the current King, so why use Linux? Photoshop is the current King, so why use Affinity Photo? The similarities are great IMO. A solid alternative OS deserves a solid alternative photo editing package. And just look at how professional this OS is, and how lovely Affinity would look on this! (screenshot from my pc) So yea, I think there's a market for it and a hefty gap that Affinity could jump into as well. Substance Designer/Painter, Blender, Unity engine, Maya, Unreal engine etc etc they all have native linux versions.

I mean, you need every shade from black to white but I'm assuming you meant that.

Hey, so it's been well over 2 years since affinity users have tried to make the devs aware that alpha editing is stupid in affinity photo, is there any progress to speak of on this? I'd 100% pay for a v2.0 update, even if the price was doubled, if I could edit channels as simply as photoshop and save non-destructively into 32bit TGA. Some rather basic functions for such an advanced piece of software.

Man, I have been getting that a lot on this forum... We ask for the methods of our workflow to be better or just possible, explaining exactly why it currently isn't viable in AP and get remarks from other forum goers like "just do this 50 step thing using these 5 other applications, whats the problem?". The problem is always quite simple, the solution is always clear... yet people on this forum seem addicted to resisting feedback on behalf of the devs and it washes out the discussion. If people dont agree (understand) with feedback, requests or constructive criticism of the topic, don't bother coming into the topic just to disregard it.

Yea I dont want to return the software even if that was an option. Hell I'd gladly pay more money for Affinity Photo if it meant they make channel packing possible. I'm hoping that with 1.9 out now, 2.0 will be a paid upgrade with the features we've been asking for for the last few years. Come on devs stop making us use photoshop, we want to use Affinity photo ; ;

its not really fixed anything, it's still awkward/impossible to use for channel packing compared to the likes of photoshop... and trust me I hate photoshop, I'd prefer Affinity any day but sadly this is the one thing I can't live without and Affinity doesn't provide. I'm still not exactly sure why it's an issue... People want to draw or copy paste, in all 4 channels, a black and white image(mask, layer whatever people call it) and save that out as a tga, tif, exr etc for the sake of using each channel but simply cannot do that without destruction occurring. It seems deceptively simple maybe, but it's such a basic function. Sadly I still can't defend Affinity Photo in this regard because it makes the application useless to everyone in my line of work. I do however still recommend Designer, but someone pointed out there is no timeline animation in designer or photo which would make their jobs as UI designers also harder/more awkward than just using Illustrator... Which kind of leaves me here saying "you could use affinity but it wont do things you want it to do, and then devs know this but haven't done anything about it for several years". Mind you you guys did add TGA eventually which I still thank you kindly for.

Honestly no one should be on W7 anymore and any or all compatibility issues are really a mute point. I sympathize with you and all because I know a fair few people still on W7 but it's a dead OS now, no more support, no more security updates. I'd go as far as to say if you want to use W7 dont have the internet on it. It certainly shouldn't be anywhere on a todo list for software like Affinity either. I would say though if you want a secure OS that doesnt data mine you and you want affinity, go with MacOS. It's not the best of both worlds because Mac isn't great but it is secure at least.

Congrats on the 1.9 release! I'd love to know more about what this is about. Editing individual channels in APhoto is still gross.

Maybe not your target audience being directly "game developers" but game development also uses photography very strongly. This is a photography suite and an image manipulation software, software used to edit and create RGBA, but sadly 1/4 of that is awkward to work with. Would you really suggest photography for game development isn't photography at all, and thus not the target audience? As the person above, I'm not trying to be harsh but "not our target audience" is quite a poor excuse for software being awkward to use. There's more industries out there other than game development that also need the use of alpha channels including photographers. If I can't use Affinity to edit my photo sourced textures (which is photography, which is your target audience) then I'd have to use photoshop... I'd rather use Affinity but like many, many others I simply can't yet. If I'm wrong then please could you elaborate on who is the target audience if photographers aren't? At any rate there is an absolutely huge market to tap into, which can only mean customers and more money toward Affinity and I don't see a downside to catering to this.