Linux user base keep growing !

[Wanesty]

19 minutes ago, Peter Werner said:

The near infinite zoom and tiled rendering feature from their floating point precision rendering system in Designer seems to have come from this project.

interesting

20 minutes ago, Peter Werner said:

The Windows versions use mainly .NET for the system specific parts whereas the Plus range used C++. What you describe might just be as simple as some component of .NET Framework relying on a different DirectX version than for example the Affinity renderer.

  didn't know about Plus using C++

and yea between others i think they're using WPF .NET for (parts of ?) the GUI so yea it would make sense that stuff are just dependencies

9 minutes ago, Peter Werner said:

not a lack of a market or user demand, but that it would only shift part of their existing user base to Linux instead of generating new sales and expanding their market

i can see this being true for adobe but in the case of serif i think it could also be the opportunity of a platform to conquer.

think VFX/Animation companies having most of their machines already on linux but a few just for adobe products:
it would not be interesting for adobe since they're already paying customers whom are willing to stay on Win/MacOS just for their product, but if affinity came up with the only quality offering on the platform they already primarily deploy

[eXcaliburN]

On 12/3/2024 at 4:43 AM, Wanesty said:

interesting

  didn't know about Plus using C++

and yea between others i think they're using WPF .NET for (parts of ?) the GUI so yea it would make sense that stuff are just dependencies

i can see this being true for adobe but in the case of serif i think it could also be the opportunity of a platform to conquer.

think VFX/Animation companies having most of their machines already on linux but a few just for adobe products:
it would not be interesting for adobe since they're already paying customers whom are willing to stay on Win/MacOS just for their product, but if affinity came up with the only quality offering on the platform they already primarily deploy

Hi Wanesty,

I went to the URL in your signature (https://affinity.liz.pet/)
The link "You can find the full guide as it's own website." just links back to the page it is already on?? Is the page it is referencing gone?

I was hoping that between Flatpak, Steam (for easy distribution) and efforts by Valve with Proton (for compatibility) that Affinity would easily be well supported on Linux by now!

I am absolutely refusing to use Windows 11 on any of my devices. Windows 10 will be the end of my time on Windows. I hope Serif gets Affinity running on Linux by then.
I have spent the last few months not even turning on Windows unless I have to for specific software!

[Wanesty]

11 hours ago, eXcaliburN said:

The link "You can find the full guide as it's own website." just links back to the page it is already on?? Is the page it is referencing gone?

I was hoping that between Flatpak, Steam (for easy distribution) and efforts by Valve with Proton (for compatibility) that Affinity would easily be well supported on Linux by now!

click the big "read the guide" button...

[Chills]

Is this of any use?
It is "Install Affinity apps (Designer / Photo) on Debian Linux"

1 hour ago, Christian M said:

https://github.com/daniel080400/AffinityLinuxTut?tab=readme-ov-file

[Snapseed]

On 11/28/2024 at 6:02 PM, Cashew said:

And btw, I fact checked, and you're wrong. Linux has, in fact, a notable growth on market share of desktop over the last 3 years, as OzNate pointed.
For many years, it oscilated, as you said, but not between "001 and 5%", and yes between 1% and 2%.

I grabbed data on last 10 years. This is the % of the market share of Linux on desktop:

2015: 1.48%
2016: 1.57%
2017: 1.54%
2018: 1.69%
2019: 1.85%
2020: 1.93%
2021: 2.08%
2022: 2.93%
2023: 3.83%
2024 (as October): 4.31%

You can look it up, if you want. I grab the average from 3 different fonts, but all are very coherent.
(And as I said before, 1% is already a big deal for a company on blue ocean strategy.)

While those statistics are interesting, the Linux market share will have to be more like 14.31% before software companies will start to sit up and take notice of potential Linux customers (and I say this as a content long term Linux user).

[Frozen Death Knight]

Just to give an example of the Linux push isn't just a passing fad, here is a pretty prominent YouTube animator who is using mixed media and has been working with Adobe and Windows for many years to perfect his craft.

Because of what happened last year with Adobe and Microsoft he has in fact replaced his entire pipeline of Adobe with alternative software such as Davinci Resolve, Reaper, and Affinity Photo. He has also started learning how to use Linux Mint and as a Linux Mint user myself I can say that most of his pipeline already works on the platform with one of those exceptions being Affinity.

This guy is able to make the switch and retain the quality of his work. There is also a very clear growing discontent among creators about the current state of the tech industry and it is getting to the point that people are willing to go to great lengths to reject the current status quo.

[Chills]

1 hour ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Just to give an example of the Linux push isn't just a passing fad,

I have heard this every couple of years for the last  30 about Linux. It never happens. 
At the moment Linux use is at one of its occasional peaks. Unless usage at least doubles from its current high it is not anything new and no one is going to get excited about it.

However you need to be on Rocky Linux as that is the one the professionals are using. Not all Linux are the same as I am sure you know. Rocky is somewhat different to other distributions in the way it works. This is part of the problem. Linux, as small a market as it is, is itself very fractured. You need to sort out the inter Linux problems so you don't need anything like Flatpak before anyone commercial is going to look at it.

[Hartmut Nörenberg]

It's always nice to see the topic coming up.

Nobody knows what is going on now with Canva and Affinity but Linux seems to be not interesting for them.
In fact you can have a very solid pipeline on Linux for 3D Production - the 2D Layer-pased compositing and Image-Editing is a "problem" since affinity is not natively (or flatpak/snap/appimage) supported and fiddling around with wine is not maintainable the easy way. Krita and Gimp can not hold up.

Maybe I was secretly wishing for Canva creating a survey who would be willing to "order" a universal code change for Affinity Suite 3 that would be OS-agnostic. If OS does not matter anymore there would only be one change for most users - no longer booting into Win or MacOS.
KDE and Gnome are so easy to use if you use one of the bigger distros that after a lot of distro hopping the flavor of what you want for a robust system is a question what "feels" better.

[Wanesty]

2 hours ago, Hartmut Nörenberg said:

Krita and Gimp can not hold up.

i would argue that while not being a perfect 1:1 replacement, krita is definitely capable of being used in proffetional contexts: blender studio (the blender employees working on the animated "open movie projects") are using it in their animation pipeline

Blender itself is now more capable of motion graphics than it ever was thanks to it's "geometry nodes"

what we are really missing is an AI style vector editor (i sadly cannot say I'm a fan of Inkscape) and publishing software

15 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

Because of what happened last year with Adobe and Microsoft he has in fact replaced his entire pipeline of Adobe with alternative software such as Davinci Resolve,

Linus Tech Tips also tried to switch completely over to Davinci Resolve, i do not remember if they stuck with it or not tho

but yea same deal, they're fed up with adobe, their subscription system and increasingly bad software

[Chills]

9 minutes ago, Wanesty said:

they're fed up with adobe, their subscription system and increasingly bad software

That is why I moved form Adobe.
However, this does not mean anyone is going to jump OS if there are other tools available on their current OS, which there are.

[Wanesty]

1 hour ago, Chills said:

However, this does not mean anyone is going to jump OS if there are other tools available on their current OS, which there are.

pookiebear you need to understand that in parallel of Adobe's bullshit, a lot of people are also getting fed up of microsoft and some of those people are stuck there because they need some specific software that only works on windows

you need to understand that they are not mutually exclusive and some of those people are here, in this topic and other similar ones, on my guide (proof, look at the OS stats, both linux users needing it and windows users looking to move)

[Chills]

17 minutes ago, Wanesty said:

pookiebear you need to understand that in parallel of Adobe's bullshit, a lot of people are also getting fed up of microsoft and some of those people are stuck there because they need some specific software that only works on windows

you need to understand that they are not mutually exclusive and some of those people are here, in this topic and other similar ones, on my guide (proof, look at the OS stats, both linux users needing it and windows users looking to move)

Your argument starts with personal insults and them waffle. Nothing solid.

[Snapseed]

7 hours ago, Hartmut Nörenberg said:

It's always nice to see the topic coming up.

Nobody knows what is going on now with Canva and Affinity but Linux seems to be not interesting for them.
In fact you can have a very solid pipeline on Linux for 3D Production - the 2D Layer-pased compositing and Image-Editing is a "problem" since affinity is not natively (or flatpak/snap/appimage) supported and fiddling around with wine is not maintainable the easy way. Krita and Gimp can not hold up.

Maybe I was secretly wishing for Canva creating a survey who would be willing to "order" a universal code change for Affinity Suite 3 that would be OS-agnostic. If OS does not matter anymore there would only be one change for most users - no longer booting into Win or MacOS.
KDE and Gnome are so easy to use if you use one of the bigger distros that after a lot of distro hopping the flavor of what you want for a robust system is a question what "feels" better.

While useful improvements have been made, and continue to be made, for Gimp, it isn't yet up to where Photoshop and Affinity Photo are plus it has a truly sucky interface (although the PhotoGimp patch considerably helps there). Although it might have a retro feel to it, PhotoLine work does well with Wine and it is up there with Photoshop and Affinity Photo.

[Hartmut Nörenberg]

When it comes to solutions with wine it is pretty hard to get this up and running in a company at a little larger scale and you will never have real support for the Application that you are running.
Yes, gimp made some progress but UI is different and even photogimp will not solve the problem that fact that most of the operations require you to merge stuff to a layer in gimp - what is a huge minus from my perspective.

Let's see what happens in 2025. Win10 support is ending and enough people will throw away hardware that is working flawlessly just because of Win11 is not supported

[Chills]

23 minutes ago, Hartmut Nörenberg said:

Let's see what happens in 2025. Win10 support is ending and enough people will throw away hardware that is working flawlessly just because of Win11 is not supported

Millions will continue to use Win10.  I know many still using XP and Win7 for some applications. For many, there is no need to move to Win11

However, I do remember a similar hysteria from the Linux people when you could not upgrade most older computers from Win95 to XP Weren't the drivers different? Some hardware simply did not get new XP drivers. Yes Linux was going to rule the world, but it didn't.

For really large companies and governments, MS will continue Win10 support for some years to come, though they don't publicize this. However, these EOL dates were flagged a LONG time ago, and most companies will have long ago upgraded to Win11 compatible computers as part of their normal planned, staged, upgrade cycles. For those in business, computers are tax-deductible over 1 or 2 years anyway.

So you are talking about a very few people not in business, who don't have Win11 compatible PC's  who don't want to stay on Win 10
This is a fairly small number.  

[Snapseed]

18 hours ago, Chills said:

Millions will continue to use Win10.  I know many still using XP and Win7 for some applications. For many, there is no need to move to Win11

However, I do remember a similar hysteria from the Linux people when you could not upgrade most older computers from Win95 to XP Weren't the drivers different? Some hardware simply did not get new XP drivers. Yes Linux was going to rule the world, but it didn't.

For really large companies and governments, MS will continue Win10 support for some years to come, though they don't publicize this. However, these EOL dates were flagged a LONG time ago, and most companies will have long ago upgraded to Win11 compatible computers as part of their normal planned, staged, upgrade cycles. For those in business, computers are tax-deductible over 1 or 2 years anyway.

So you are talking about a very few people not in business, who don't have Win11 compatible PC's  who don't want to stay on Win 10
This is a fairly small number.  

On a factual point, I have to correct that statement.

Linux really does rule (and run) the world on servers and supercomputers. It's just on the desktop where it lacks market share although one of the unices, macOS, is currently doing quite well on the desktop.

[fde101]

5 minutes ago, Snapseed said:

Linux really does rule (and run) the world on servers and supercomputers.

Not by itself.  In truly mission-critical areas there are still a fair number of mainframe users running z/OS, z/VM and the like, and the mainframe is actually making a comeback of sorts, with the overall market share of mainframe users overall on the rise.  Linux does have a massive market share in the server and HPC realm, including sometimes running on those mainframes alongside the more traditional mainframe operating systems (modern mainframes are rather good at hosting multiple platforms at once), but there are different kinds of workloads out there with a wide range of different requirements, and Linux is not the one solution to end all - it is great for a lot of situations, but there are some cases where the traditional mainframe operating systems remain superior (and not just for running legacy code - there are technical benefits of the mainframe platform that make it superior to the "modern" ones for some use cases).

I don't expect that we will be doing our design work on z/OS or z/VM any time soon, of course, whereas Linux on the desktop is a 100% viable host for those purposes, with a fair amount of design-related software being available there already (Blender for 3D work, Davinci Resolve for video editing and color grading, various high-end video compositing solutions, multiple DAWs such as Bitwig Studio for audio production, etc.)

[Chills]

9 minutes ago, Snapseed said:

On a factual point, I have to correct that statement.

Linux really does rule (and run) the world on servers and supercomputers. It's just on the desktop where it lacks market share although one of the unices, macOS, is currently doing quite well on the desktop.

On a factual point, you are wrong.  Having spent 30 years in critical systems, whilst it runs web servers Linux is not used in critical systems, in fact 178C and 61508 prohibit it.

Second factually, and most non-technical people make this mistake, Linux is NOT a UNIX.  Linux and UNIX are both POSIX API OS there are dozens of POSIX API OS and RTOS out there that are architecturally very different.,   What you are suggesting is that a Bentley Continental and a model T-Ford are the same bcause they both have 4 wheels and are painted black.

BTX I do know a couple of critical systems using Linux, but that is because they have done very heavy static and dynamic testing of the source, and it is a much modified Linux that is not publicly available.

[Gundi]

Ich wurde heute von einem Kollegen auf Affinity aufmerksam gemacht. Leider gibt es keine Linux-Version und damit ist die Software für mich keine Lösung.

[Chills]

17 hours ago, Gundi said:

Ich wurde heute von einem Kollegen auf Affinity aufmerksam gemacht. Leider gibt es keine Linux-Version und damit ist die Software für mich keine Lösung.

What a pointless remark, and communicated in a way most will not understand.
 

[Snapseed]

On 1/8/2025 at 3:54 PM, Gundi said:

Ich wurde heute von einem Kollegen auf Affinity aufmerksam gemacht. Leider gibt es keine Linux-Version und damit ist die Software für mich keine Lösung.

All is not lost and there is an option. It is to follow Hartmut Doering's advice about using Affinity Photo on Linux via a Windows VM.