Best (easiest) way to run Affinity Photo on Linux?

[lphilpot]

1 minute ago, Chills said:

Well you disagree with Linus Torvolds who has repeatedly said Linux is not a good choice for a desktop, and it won't succeed as a general desktop system.

Yes, I do although Linus designed and implemented the kernel -- not all of Linux -- but that's another point. But in a commercial context I don't doubt he's right. But in all fairness he's also highly opinionated and not shy about loading his commentary with shock value. 🙂 Just sayin'...

It's highly dependent on the definition of "general desktop system". In the corporate / business world, he's probably right. But not on purely technical grounds so much as the lack of a controlling superior force (and even he, as BDFL, isn't that). There are technical standards and it is (or can be) pretty compliant technically, but there's no de facto GUI standard for all platforms -- despite Free Desktop, etc. Desktop management en masse would be a nightmare at a corporate level without serious constraints in place. But individually, at home? That's another matter altogether. However, if Joe Homeuser "doesn't want to learn" (in general), there's nothing that can be done about that.

5 minutes ago, Chills said:

Several major players including Dell and HP did support Linux by making it an option on their new desktops and laptops.  This only lasted about a year.

Yep, for basically the reason I stated - No de facto standard. They jumped on Linux and the desktop turned out to be a bubble that burst under pressure.

7 minutes ago, Chills said:

To paraphrase: you may not like Windows, but it is the least-worst system we have.  🙂

Can't say that I disagree in general, but (for example) if I wasn't a photographer I'd be back on Linux at home in a heartbeat. It's much more malleable than Windows (which in turn is vastly more usable than OSX IMO). Apple hardware? Other than mice, keyboards and their "servers", it's consistently good. Their GUI? Not so much IMO. But I digress...

However -- Linux in the server space? That's a completely different universe and Linux is firmly established. For example, Oracle databases ran VERY WELL (in temporal context) on Solaris RISC systems back in the 2000s, but what did Oracle do after they bought SUN? Discontinued Solaris and put their eggs in the (their, primarily) Linux basket. The places I saw Windows Server most often were file servers, SQL, AD and application-bundled (typically YASS - yet another SQL server). Not that it's not found elsewhere, but Linux is everywhere in server space.

But that's aside from the conversation here.

[firstdefence]

I think all these multi-page posts on Linux and Affinity is the exact reason Serif do not do a Linux version, it's way too much hassle. Don't get me wrong I like Linux, Kali and Tails. I run both from my Dell Vostro.

I love how Windows 11 is trying to emulate the look of mac. 

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

I think all these multi-page posts on Linux and Affinity is the exact reason Serif do not do a Linux version, it's way too much hassle.

I think it is mostly because there does not seem to be much of a chance that it would be profitable enough to justify developing & particularly offering customer support for it.

[Chills]

36 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

I love how Windows 11 is trying to emulate the look of mac. 

Err... Windows isn't trying to emulate a mac.
Its trying to emulate Solaris.

People have this crazy idea that Apple invented the windowing system. They didn't .
DR Gem was out there along with Solaris and other systems.

BTW I am not a MS-Windows fanboy as I am currently running OSX, Win 11, Lunix on computers
I have also used various UNIX and other POSIX RTOS, CPM and and several RTOS.

It's not until you start running static analyses on OS code  that you really start to see the problems.
(for RTOS they also need MISRA-C compliance)

[Chills]

37 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I think it is mostly because there does not seem to be much of a chance that it would be profitable enough to justify developing & particularly offering customer support for it.

That is the truth of the matter.
As we keep saying for the desk/laptop  96% of the market is MAC/Windows.

The remaining 4% is heavily fragmented and Flatpak is not the answer. Added to which the number of that 4% that might actually want and pay for Affinity tools is vanishingly small compared to the costs. 

Linux has been "about to take off" on the desk/laptop market for about 30 years and hasn't. It has in fact gone backwards from the high point 25(?) years ago.

[firstdefence]

21 minutes ago, Chills said:

Err... Windows isn't trying to emulate a mac.
Its trying to emulate Solaris.

I said the look, i.e. with the centred dock, I use mac because it's less problematic than windows, I like the UI and how stable it runs, never said apple made the windowed system. Never touched solaris. 

[lphilpot]

24 minutes ago, Chills said:

People have this crazy idea that Apple invented the windowing system. They didn't .
DR Gem was out there along with Solaris and other systems.

Not to mention Jobs' visit to Xerox PARC, after which he suddenly had all kinds of 'original' ideas... The GUI goes a long way back, including to Doug Englebart at PARC.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, lphilpot said:

Not to mention Jobs' visit to Xerox PARC, after which he suddenly had all kinds of 'original' ideas...

Jobs never claimed that the ideas presented in the interface demo he saw at PARC were his original idea. But he was the first to turn those ideas into a commercially viable product & bring it to market.

[lphilpot]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

Jobs never claimed that the ideas presented in the interface demo he saw at PARC were his original idea. But he was the first to turn those ideas into a commercially viable product & bring it to market.

Maybe not but he was comfortable letting minor details like attribution slide into obscurity as he took apparent de facto credit for everything Apple released. But that's water under the bridge, anyway.

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, lphilpot said:

Maybe not but he was comfortable letting minor details like attribution slide into obscurity as he took apparent de facto credit for everything Apple released.

He didn't care one way or the other about that, nor did he need to. It was others, including but not limited to Apple's PR & marketing people, who wanted to make it all about what Jobs had done at Apple.

[Chills]

56 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Jobs never claimed that the ideas presented in the interface demo he saw at PARC were his original idea. But he was the first to turn those ideas into a commercially viable product & bring it to market.

Hardly there were several windowing systems around that were commercially viable

[Chills]

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

I said the look, i.e. with the centred dock, I use mac because it's less problematic than windows, I like the UI and how stable it runs, never said apple made the windowed system. Never touched solaris. 

Had you used Solaris you would know that the doc could be anywhere left, centred, right , top. 
In fact, from memory of using it, the look and feel of Solaris was well ahead of OSX.  (and MS-Windows )
Though this is hardly a surprise as OSX came out of BSD  UNIX and Xerox PARC

[R C-R]

11 minutes ago, Chills said:

Hardly there were several windowing systems around that were commercially viable

Like what? Which ones combined all 3 "WIMP" (windows, icons, menus, pointer) UI elements in any one product & actually sold them widely enough to be considered commercially viable?

[affinity-chicken]

On 2/24/2024 at 9:44 PM, firstdefence said:

I said the look, i.e. with the centred dock...

Centering the dock takes much more CPU time because you have to calculate the left position. Using a left assigned dock as in Windows 10 you just have to set the x-position to 0 (zero). That's faster.

Okay, I was just kidding 😉

 

Edited March 8 by affinity-chicken

[firstdefence]

7 hours ago, affinity-chicken said:

Centering the dock takes much more CPU time because you have to calculate the left position. Using a left assigned dock as in Windows 10 you just have to set the x-position to 0 (zero). That's faster.

Okay, I was just kidding 😉

Unless Zero is in the middle  lateral thinking is my speciality 

My dock is that wide it takes up the whole width of the screen lol!

 

[MattyWS]

On 2/24/2024 at 7:30 PM, firstdefence said:

I think all these multi-page posts on Linux and Affinity is the exact reason Serif do not do a Linux version, it's way too much hassle. Don't get me wrong I like Linux, Kali and Tails. I run both from my Dell Vostro.

What do you mean? Multiple threads with many pages on the topic shows that there is an interest. I'm trying to understand the thought process you are suggesting the devs looking at the forum and being like "Damn, there's a ton of people wanting this thing, lets never do it".

[MattyWS]

On 2/24/2024 at 8:20 PM, Chills said:

As we keep saying for the desk/laptop  96% of the market is MAC/Windows.

I think this is incorrect. Mac and Windows have about 87-88% global desktop share. with linux rising to around 4-5% not including chromeOS which is also just linux (it is, get over it), which is around 2-3% and the rest is unknown (though I don't know if steamdeck is counted, it's technically a linux desktop but I doubt most people use the browser so they may not get counted).

If we're being conservative here linux is 6-7% desktop share really, give or take a few million steamdeck users if they were counted. I'm curious about the remaining ~6% unknown desktop share though. They're desktops, but those who care enough to mask themselves are probably the paranoid linux crowd lol... Which would make the linux share more like 12% but we'll never know that for sure.

The stats I think are based on desktop browser use.

RIP FreeBSD, clearly dead in the water.

[MattyWS]

On 2/24/2024 at 8:20 PM, Chills said:

Added to which the number of that 4% that might actually want and pay for Affinity tools is vanishingly small compared to the costs. 

Just to throw this out there as well, I agree that not 100% of linux users would buy affinity products, but also, how many windows or mac users would buy affinity products either? My guess is a higher percentage of mac users would buy than the percentage of windows users for sure. Given how windows is basically the default I would imagine the very vast majority of users could not care less about photo editing. At least Mac users are more likely to be the target audience for Serif, windows users are fragmented to all kinds of people from your grandma to public library users.

[lphilpot]

54 minutes ago, MattyWS said:

how many windows or mac users would buy affinity products either? My guess is a higher percentage of mac users would buy than the percentage of windows users for sure. Given how windows is basically the default I would imagine the very vast majority of users could not care less about photo editing.

Well, maybe... if taken as a percentage of the user base but that's only a reflection of the Mac's inherent concentration in creative areas -- and relative absence elsewhere. After 2+ decades in corporate IT I can tell you that Macs (note, not iPhones, but Macs) were rare and only when individuals just had to have them, usually for nothing more than personal preference. In a corporate (i.e., AD) context they were a pain to integrate, maintain and support.

The absolute size of a market is what's important to a vendor, since no one survives nor thrives on a large percentage but low absolute customer count. In absolute terms the overwhelming number of Windows users may still provide an equal, if not larger, user population regardless of percentage. That's also a big reason why (among others, like the lack of single de facto standards in many areas) Linux isn't attractive enough to Serif and other desktop vendors. Although the overall number of Linux users -- in one form or another -- is large, it's still small in absolute terms within the creative segment.

And I say all that not as a Windows / MS fan (by any stretch of the imagination). In fact, all things being equal I'd run Linux in a heartbeat -- I did for years. But in the scales of market realities, Linux is currently worth commercially supporting only in the server space, not desktop, regardless of what I and others might wish.

[Chills]

1 hour ago, lphilpot said:

And I say all that not as a Windows / MS fan (by any stretch of the imagination). In fact, all things being equal I'd run Linux in a heartbeat -- I did for years. But in the scales of market realities, Linux is currently worth commercially supporting only in the server space, not desktop, regardless of what I and others might wish.

This is so true.
When you look at the very small number of desktop Linux users compared to the global number of desktop computer users and then the demographics in that userbase you can see why games are on Linux but not Affinity. 

Resolve was a very special case.   There was a very custom Linux version of that when it was over $250K a seat and required over $25k of hardware as a dongle to make it work.  When they brought out a $1000 Resolve, it was on  Mac and then PC. The Linux version that didn't require expensive HW dongles was much later and on one, and only one, distribution of Linux.  

Even now, the Linux version of Resolve is missing stuff that is standard on Mac and PC.   This won't change until Linux PLC signs agreements with various companies, and it is all delivered as a binary (not source code). If resolve are not doing expensive agreements to put these things into the Linux Resolve,  there is no way Serif could justify it.
The problem is you have Linux Religion vs real world business. No matter how noisy the Linux devotees are it doesn't add up for the real world accountants.

[lphilpot]

7 minutes ago, Chills said:

The problem is you have Linux Religion vs real world business. No matter how noisy the Linux devotees are it doesn't add up for the real world accountants.

Which is kind of a shame because Linux has technical attributes and I really like it. It just doesn't fit with the commercial desktop world in some ways. Servers? Well that's a different story...

[Chills]

33 minutes ago, lphilpot said:

Which is kind of a shame because Linux has technical attributes and I really like it. It just doesn't fit with the commercial desktop world in some ways. Servers? Well that's a different story...

And with servers, it's not for the reasons you probably think it is.

Linux doesn't have any technical attributes I can see that are not in other OS's  In fact I remember someone pointing out they were fixing bugs in Linux that the Unix world had sorted  2 decades earlier and were "well known"

[lphilpot]

29 minutes ago, Chills said:

Linux doesn't have any technical attributes I can see that are not in other OS's

In our experience (before I retired) with ~300-odd Windows servers and about 100+ Linux (mostly RHEL), the Linux servers were more stable, easier to manage remotely, easier to patch (with more reliable patches and less downtime) and less subject to continual upgrade requirements. Plus consolidation generally worked better on Linux, and Solaris for that matter. There were very few "one app, one server, one database" bundles like we had all over the place with Windows and SQL Server. In the rare instances the databases (Oracle and MySQL mostly) were dedicated to an environment it was due to usage requirements and scale, not OS. We could spin up on Linux VM and use if for multiple purposes, but Windows VMs spread like rabbits.

[firstdefence]

5 hours ago, MattyWS said:

What do you mean? Multiple threads with many pages on the topic shows that there is an interest. I'm trying to understand the thought process you are suggesting the devs looking at the forum and being like "Damn, there's a ton of people wanting this thing, lets never do it".

They have enough on their plate sorting Mac, Windows and OSPad fixes out  without adding Linux to the mix.

Is it financially worth it? while there are a lot of linux desktop users is it financially viable to make a paid for system that caters for 4-5% of the desktop OS market and then deal with the compatibility of the major desktop distros e.g. Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Fedora and Arch and all their baby sub distro's and, while there is a hive of linux bees ready to get their busy fingers on the keyboard and into the command line to solve all the issues that come up, I don't think enthusiasm will sustain development.

Caveat: I have been known to be wrong    

[Chills]

7 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

 and then deal with the compatibility of the major desktop distros e.g. Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Fedora and Arch and all their baby sub distro's and,

There is the problem.  Resolve was for ONE Linux distro and only one.  If you used any other Linux, you were on your own. Also, it was a rather obscure distro.