LucasKA

Great, appreciate that help. What then is the difference, between a Group and a Layer in Inkscape?

Hi all, I am collaborating with a friend, but he only has access to Inkscape. All the layers in the affinity export are groups, but don't show up in the Inkscape layers panel, which really is a bummer. Anyone have any experience in exporting Affinity designs to be readable in Inkscape in a usable manner?

A lot depends on the vendor. The package systems mentioned (AppImage/Flatpak/Snap) are all things that "just work". Traditionally though, most vendors only supplied .deb or .rpm packages, which meant other systems that don't have those package managers needed to do more work. If they release it as AppImage then there should be no issue at all.

In terms of the code, yes, and if not, Linux has the packages to run it. The cool thing is that most communities will wrap/package up a popular app for the community to consume. The downside is that there can be multiple ways to install a package on Linux. It's annoying in some cases where UI conventions don't match, but I am a UI Engineer so that bothers me more.

Polls are not a good measure compared to asking people to actually put down money. You get a lot of false positives when asking, "Would you buy this?". People want to be positive and do want things to be successful. Kickstarter is a good way to gauge who is willing to actually pay, and if it doesn't hit the development funding needs, the project loses only that campaign prep time.

Another perspective is, that sounds like someone's livelihood being threatened by emergent technology, not necessarily truth.

There's a name for that.

If you look back, I also said, "nothing in tech is trivial", so I understand the effort of uncoupling business logic from UI (Additionally, I am an UI Engineer professionally). My point with the comment is that having developed for 2 platforms with wildly different UI Layers, they had the opportunity to decouple, and the learning from that in order to make it multiplatform. Serif's decision doesn't appear to stem from technology IMO. Originally Designer was staunchly a Mac ONLY product, but apparently the business opportunity was there for Windows. We will never know what any of this stuff is truly based on, just what Serif says. One thing is extremely apparent. They do not care about the Linux market.

I don't know the architecture of their UI, but lets say it's as simple as running ImageMagick for 90% of (raster) transformations, it's still not a trivial task to port UI from Cocoa/WhateverthefuckWindowsuses to GTK/Qt. I know MacOS has alot of higher level tooling in UIKit, which could make things tough to straight port. Affinity started out as a purely MacOS targeted application. Anyway, my point is that very little software development is as simple as talking about software development.

So why not write an Affinity clone to serve the Linux market?

It runs on Mac and Windows, so already it's using two "very different UI toolkits". I don't really find that an excuse. The answer, as always, is they just don't want to.

Appreciate it. If it happens again, I'll screen capture the flow. I can't remember exactly the order of operations for the current state of my document.

Why are these two products coupled is the bigger question. Why do I only have granular control over my assets with a secondary software package? That's some Adobe movement right there.

- Saying yes did nothing, so I resorted to Resource Manager. I don't have Publisher so I have no context on that. - Sure it is a function of Designer. It might not be public, but it bothers me that it's in but not accessible. - Maybe I misspoke. I don't know the difference between Embedded and Linked, because the only time that context seems to matter is in the Resource Manager. I drag and drop my images into the .afdesign doc when working. The long and short, is asset awareness goes wrong for some reason and I needed to manually find them again. Then that manual fix broke and I couldn't access the solution I used before (Resource Manager). Now ALL my assets are missing, with no prompt from resource manager, and no way to access resource manager. So I just rolled back to a couple days ago. It's not ideal, and I lost some work, but of course these happen at a time where I have a deadline

So if it's not clear, my questions are: - How do I re-link assets in bulk, or how do I prevent this issue from ever even happening? - How do I access Resource Manager when I want to, not just when Affinity Designer thinks it's a good idea?

Except nothing has changed. Not the title, location, content. So after 3 times of manually updating the locations (that haven't changed) in the Resource Manger (that I can't seem to find unless Affinity offers it to me). I'm asking for help. This is a decent sized project, is there anyway to point to the location for assets as opposed to assign each ones path individually? This has already killed about 2 hours of working time.

Not just RHEL though, the whole company and it's entire, open source portfolio. 34 Billion for basically software support services. But think about the companies that do run RHEL, and the opportunity for Volume Licenses for modern Design/Photo software that does run on that platform would be amazing as well as the consumer level that is starved for the applications. Affinity is a Windows shop at it's core though, and looking at it's history, I'm not sure it has the resources to support that kind of development effort.

I'm not criticizing you or your budget. It's pretty awesome there's even a zero cost solution that can compete with enterprise lock in, and anything given back is very much appreciated I'm sure. There's a contingent of people who will never give any money for software because of digital entitlement. Often, they are very vocal. Photopea might be a competitor to Affinity Photo, but not Affinity Design. It looks like a Raster editor. Could be fine for basic editing, but I don't find GIMP to be cumbersome as you do, in fact I find Photoshop to be cumbersome. Anyone used to 10+ years of one UI is going to find a different UI cumbersome as you learn the flow. That doesn't discount GIMP as a competitor, as much as your own preference. CMYK, that actually is a useful feature that GIMP lacks. Photopea lacks artboards, symbols and vector layers which is a modern design workflow, and also it seems to be Nagware with a GIANT AD on the right that takes up like 25% of my real estate. Steam runs great on Linux, but not all games support Linux so you are going to run into an issue where some of your games wont run. Also, you are now locked into Serif's file format (.afdesign and whatever photo), which is arguably worse than being locked into PSD, since Affinity isn't industry standard (as bad as that standard is), so if you move to another photo editing software you wont have an affinity converter.

I work at Red Hat (I'm a UI Engineer even), so I contribute to Open Source projects (mostly web though since that's my expertise) and I contribute to Red Hat projects as well. I have also directly donated money to Blender, Krita, Audacity, Ardour, Inkscape, ElementaryOS, Solus, and other projects. I have no problem dropping money on useful tools (I don't even use Elementary or Solus and have given them $25) There's a rock and a hard place that I think some of these FOSS Design tools struggle with, and it's being in the middle of the spectrum. There's the Enterprise (Where Red Hat shines, raking in BILLIONS), and there's the hobbyist/amateur. The latter are notoriously cheap (Like won't even shell out for Affinity cheap), and are most likely pirating the current Adobe suite. The former is a harder to break into and there's real real money. Then there are the people in the middle (Digital Designers such as myself). There's plenty of people asking for it, even this one thread in one corner of the internet has garnered 37 pages of discussion. There are lots of conversations but not a ton of action, hence the reason I think someone could clean up in that middle Design space, and where a lot attempts are falling short (Gravit). As for your personal stance, I actually suggest you would be better served just staying with Windows. You definitely aren't going to be able to "play all the games you want". You think creative software is bad? The Windows monopoly on gaming graphics with DirectX is much stronger than even that sweet sweet PSD vendor lock Adobe has you in.

Yes, this makes sense. However, I actually quit making any talking points about Serif specifically a few weeks ago. Begging a company that is clearly uninterested is just pointless, and seeing as how Designer was originally MacOS exclusive "from scratch" and then they rebuilt it for Windows, I can clearly see that porting again would probably be betting the farm since they didn't have that business foresight.

Heres a couple after 7 seconds of searching. https://labs.fedoraproject.org/en/design-suite/ https://ubuntustudio.org/ Which is beyond ridiculous because this isn't a requirement on MacOS or Windows for the OS to be ready out of the box with all software (though the Mac does a pretty good job of that for Audio/Video).

Red Hat's use of open source is absolutely not an aside, it's the core of the company (to the point where acquired company code even goes open). You're thinking of Apple and Microsoft who only open source things if it directly benefits them, or to attempt to buy their way in to FOSS goodwill. I'm not saying that Serif needs to use those business models, nor even go open source. I'm saying the idea there's no money to be made on Linux is straight garbage, when there are even open source companies making money. There's plenty of proprietary software on Linux that I pay for on a regular basis too.

We are back to chicken/egg. Serif already supports Windows/Mac, so anyone jumping ship would just be cannibalizing their own user base that pays them. Not a huge incentive on that, IMO. There is a contingent, both of people IN the Linux world and right on the fence. The Blender development fund is at $43,000 a month in just sponsorship. They don't have a support business model. Half a million a year in basically grant money? Red Hat sells millions of support subscriptions of freely downloadable software. I really think a company that serves that edge is going to get handsomely rewarded.

There's no way to answer that chicken/egg reliably. Wether or not it would would move people to Linux is the wrong question IMO, but rather, does it solve a need that enough Linux users have well enough for people to pay for it, and would that revenue be enough to justify development?

Too bad Serif is a super closed company. I'd be interested in the metrics of volume seat licenses (100 or more) vs single licenses for Affinity Designer. I contend it's much higher on the latter, and I am going to say I misspoke about "Hobbyist", but rather it's not "Enterprise" level. I've yet to run across any Affinity products in the wild, and I've worked at some decent sized companies that are very design heavy. The only people I've run across using it, is hobbyists and freelancers that have a choice. Pros might be the target, but is it making headway in that department? I'd venture to say that Affinity Designer has a similar marketshare to the Linux Desktop. That doesn't make it not worth looking at though, now does it? I'm basing it a lot on the use case of Blender. Blender is such good, creative software, that enterprise VFX houses not only use it, they've even migrated to the Linux platform for their asset pipelines. It's another benefit that it's open source, so internal tooling and pipelines can be developed around it. Anyway, I have no real interest in petitioning Serif to port there program to Linux, I know a fools errand. I do know that I will drop AD the moment there's a package on Linux that serves my workflow.