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Affinity products for Linux


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I just registered so that I could comment on this thread.

 

I'm a big time proponent of Linux but I do understand the need for companies to be able to make money from what they do or the service they provide, so that they could continue doing just that. Being a much (much, much, much...) smaller outfit than Adobe, Serif will of course need to prioritise their limited resources in terms of manpower and cash injections, directing them to platforms that will bring in a better return over investment. However, I would like to argue that it is also important for Serif to make their software available to as many major platforms as possible in order to expand their revenue stream. Before the actual roll-out, I'm sure Serif takes the logical approach to do a feasibility assessment before investing time and money towards any development, which I'm hoping the same had happened for the Linux platform.

 

Now for developing for the Linux platform in a cost effective way, my suggestion to Serif would be to actually get the Linux community to put their money where their mouth is. This they can do by deciding first on how much will it cost (in both manpower and money) to actually deliver a working product for the Linux platform. As soon as Serif has a clear idea of the total investment, they can then calculate the number of paid users will it take to offset the cost for starting this in the first place. Once that is finalised, Serif can then decide on the approach they would want to take for their Registration of Interest. For instance, they can start a 'fund me' or pre-pre-pre-sale option that could be hosted on Serif itself or on popular options such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo. This is also where they could specify that it's an "all or nothing" fund, whereby the development will only take off once the minimum funding is reached in full, or else nothing will happen at all.

 

I know I've oversimplified things and that it looks like an easy enough idea to implement, but doing the feasibility study itself will involve additional expenses that could otherwise go towards improving products that are already there. But I do hope that I'll get to see a new development on this soon and that Linux will be given its own proper place and priority.

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LOL what a fruitless discussion!

Fact is, that it always depends more on the point of view here. So to say from which side or domain you are looking at it.

For plain end users Linux/Unix might not be of much appeal due to lesser overall usage easiness and the spanning wild groth of distribution offers etc. Further there is a bigger lack of usual/general easier to use commercial end user software. - On the other side, from a developers and administrators point of view, it's a powerful (low cost) Unix like system which offers allmost all what expensive Unix workstations offered in the past for huge amount of costs. Thus it's nowadays the overall mostly used defacto server and hosting platform! And of course there are also companies which do a more professional business with that, which are selling their specific implementation distros, support and training etc.

Also let's don't forget that a bunch of commercial and so claimed professional software (...the Affinity products here too and thus are no exception) do relay and depend on certain code and libraries, which have been initially developed on these systems (like RAW processing, lens database, Exif handling, ICC profile handling, certain image file formats, file based databases etc. etc.) and then be ported over to other systems like Windows. - So at least from a developers point of view Linux systems are a good foundation too.

However, marketing wise it is of course in contrast not that much the sought platform for big profit sales of commercial end user software, or that of designers and artists here.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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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.

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I'd love to see a Linux version of Affinity. I'll have no problem paying for it, just as I had no problem paying for the 400+ Linux games I have on Steam for example...

I hope the developers at Serif don't give much attention to the many trolls in this thread. It's pretty obvious they don't know what they are talking about, but they are pretty noisy nonetheless... just ignore them please.

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6 hours ago, tonyrh said:

I'd love to see a Linux version of Affinity. I'll have no problem paying for it, just as I had no problem paying for the 400+ Linux games I have on Steam for example...

I hope the developers at Serif don't give much attention to the many trolls in this thread. It's pretty obvious they don't know what they are talking about, but they are pretty noisy nonetheless... just ignore them please.

Please consider that a few dozen, or even a few hundred, Linux users posting here saying that they would buy Linux versions of the Affinity apps has nothing to do with the kind of market research any for-profit company would do (& Serif almost certainly has done) before deciding if there is currently enough demand to justify the considerable expense & diversion of resources that would involve.

 

If you have browsed through the other topics, it should be obvious that as things stand now, the developers still have a lot of work to do on the existing desktop Windows & Mac apps, the iOS Affinity Photo app, the as yet not even in beta stage desktop Publisher & iOS Designer apps, & the delayed & not currently in development Affinity DAM app. With all that work left to do, why would they commit to the development & support of another set of Affinity apps for yet another OS?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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Why is it that Linux users always preach about how wonderful and professional Linux is, yet expect a small company like Serif to make up for the fact it is just not true.

 

My point, Linux has Wine, a product that is supposed to allow Windows products to run on Linux. It obviously doesn't work. So, dear Linux users, why not get the writers of Wine to up their game and make it work. Serif would be happy to sell you a Windows version of Affinity Designer, Photo or Publisher (eventually). That way they could concentrate on improving existing software, rather than wasting all that Linux development time with all the financial risk involved. And in theory, as Mac OS is based or Unix, as is Linux, why not? If Macintosh can get a Unix based software to work mainstream, why not Wine.

 

If the Wine developers made a professional version that actually worked, think of the potential market base for them. Much wider than for Serif applications because literally thousand of cheap, professional (and shareware and free) programs would then be available for all Linux users. Question is, would Linux users pay for Wine? I would pay for it. Or are most Linux users too "Cheap" ? I don't know about Windows licensing but as Wine exists, it is solvable, obviously.

 

After all, the basic Linux OS is free, so $50 (e.g.) for Wine would still make it a cheap system, without the current limits. 

 

 

 

 

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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1 hour ago, R C-R said:

a lot of things...

Thanks the insight, but I was not talking to you or to the other trolls uninformed users with no experience in software development.

Keep eating apples tho, they are good for your health... if not a bit expensive! :)

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6 minutes ago, toltec said:

too many things...

 

 

 

It's pretty clear you don't know what Wine is. Or Unix for that matter. Or how FOSS development works. I'm afraid you could not even define what an operating system is actually...

Also, how do you know what Serif would be happy to do or do not? Do you work for them or just spend a lot of time trolling using the forum?

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1 hour ago, tonyrh said:

It's pretty clear you don't know what Wine is.

 

Well, according to the Wine website  "Wine (originally an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, 

 

That to me sounds like ..  Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, 

 

Would you not expect it to run a Windows application like (oh. lets say Affinity Photo) on Linux

 

What am I missing here? 

 

 

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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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.

 

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1 hour ago, tonyrh said:

It's pretty clear you don't know what Wine is. Or Unix for that matter. Or how FOSS development works. I'm afraid you could not even define what an operating system is actually...

Also, how do you know what Serif would be happy to do or do not? Do you work for them or just spend a lot of time trolling using the forum?

 

Why do Linux users always resort to personal insults? Is the average user base under 10 or something? Adults (mostly) present an argument.

 

Well, OK, maybe "mostly" is an exaggeration ;)

 

Seriously though, that sort of childish behaviour does not help your case to have Linux users and the Linux platform treated seriously.

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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15 minutes ago, Ruslik said:

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.

 

Good points

 

1. So, why not make a commercial version ? If Linux wants to be seen as "professional" it needs professional companies providing professional software. This is my main argument against Linux. I tried to use Linux professionally 10 years ago but was stumped by a total lack of professional software. Nothing seems to have changed in 10 years. Unlike Serif, Wine is already well established in Linux and could potentially have a much bigger impact and bigger market than Serif.

 

2. Sure, but licensing can be sorted at a price. What software company would turn down a few thousand extra sales ?

 

3. Agreed. 100%, but as I said, there are thousands of software programs that would become available. It's the chicken and egg thing, maybe if enough professional software companies saw that their software was being used on Linux systems (under emulation) that would encourage them to produce a native version. Especially if at the beginning, peripheral apps would not have to be developed as native versions. 

 

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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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.

 

51 minutes ago, toltec said:

I tried to use Linux professionally 10 years ago but was stumped by a total lack of professional software. Nothing seems to have changed in 10 years.

 

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 ;)

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23 minutes ago, Ruslik said:

Well it depends on what you consider professional software.

 

 

Well, at the time I needed a Photoshop equivalent (gimp wasn't really good enough), a green screen software program. an internet design program and a printer driver that worked for both of my printers. A Canon A3 and a Mitsubishi dye sub printer. 

 

Basically I was taking photos in a studio, I needed to change the backgrounds, proof the end pictures for the customer and finally, load them to a website.

 

I could't get any of the software then and ten years later, still can't.

 

Although I'm not sure if there is a good Linux website design program for responsive websites with widgets these days ?

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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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.

39 minutes ago, toltec said:

Although I'm not sure if there is a good website design program for responsive websites with widgets these days ?

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.

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Linux website design or UI design progs?  Google Web Designer, ForeUI, Edraw, Pencil ... and so on. - Though honestly the best in this regard for website design is still handcoded stuff and thus finally a good and capable text editor and build system for this, as far as you are familiar with the tools and used frameworks.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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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.

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39 minutes ago, Ruslik said:

...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...

What not suitable and possble? All those different devices have defined UIs and APIs, are constructed out of windows/screens, containers, controls, menus and other widgets. Which in turn all have settable properties, event handler and so on. So it's all in code, programmable code, which is the base here for all that stuff. - Every GUI builder or UI design tool here finally does nothing else then giving you just an abstracted graphical UI access to those always available underlayed capabilities! So there is no magic about all this and many tools here have their limitations, so you often have to dive into the code yourself to make things to work the intentional intended way. As already said, if you know to code and the domain specific APIs you can solve things much better and also in a much more dynamic way than most of these UI tools offer you to do.

 

 

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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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?

19 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

All those different devices have defined UIs and APIs, are constructed out of windows/screens, containers, controls, menus and other widgets. Which in turn all have settable properties, event handler and so on. So it's all in code, programmable code, which is the base here for all that stuff.

Sure, try to tell that to a UI designer who has some kind of graphic design degree, he/she sure will appreciate such approach :)

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Ah Ok haha, so you are looking at it more from a UIX designers view, well what should I say, those guys are always mostly only able to draw, drag and click and just few of them have really clues about what programming is all about and overall means ... ;) LOL (well of course not meant overall seriously here).

Assembler? Oh naa those times have gone, nowadays it's mostly replaced by using other portable system near prog languages (C/C++, Rust etc.) instead and since there are high optimization compilers, you don't usually need that degree of specific hand optimized code anymore. Though on the other side it doesn't hurt either to know something more about direct programming and CPU/GPU internals here.

Well the UIX popularity and apps around that domain is more due to the fact, that nowadays also more and more designers (web designers etc.) are diving into the domain to developing apps. So to say they also started to do what software developers -aka programmers- did mainly before.  In the past there was a clearer separation between designers and developers (coders), today these segments started to overlap more and more.

If you have to create good and well behaving platform specific UIs, you sooner or later have to get some deeper knowledge and experiences with their corresponding APIs, otherwise you don't really understand what the tools (or what you) are doing there and what really happens underneath the hood. What and where the differences are and how to solve certain possible context specific issues etc. - So to say it's like you are saying, just (re)use some algorithm or datastructure here without knowing at all, how that one really works and what it's finally doing!

If you want to do something here the right way, you also need to have some fair amount of knowledge and clues about it!

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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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.

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On 18/11/2017 at 0:37 PM, R C-R said:

No offense intended, but you also seem to be unwilling to give up. The developers have made it clear that at least for now they have no interest in developing Linux versions of the Affinity apps. Three pages of user comments debating the pros & cons of doing that have not changed anything: it still boils down to the relative market demand for new Linux versions vs. for improvements to the existing versions & for the development & release of the other Affinity apps for the three platforms they currently support.

 

Determining that market demand must be based not on how many Linux users there are or how good an OS it is, but on how many of them are doing the kind of work that would be likely to motivate them to buy Linux versions to do that work vs. the same thing for Windows & Apple users. The rest of it does not matter.

 

I understand this, but this is not the debate that others are throwing into the thread.

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19 hours ago, toltec said:

 

Why do Linux users always resort to personal insults? Is the average user base under 10 or something? Adults (mostly) present an argument.

 

Well, OK, maybe "mostly" is an exaggeration ;)

 

Seriously though, that sort of childish behaviour does not help your case to have Linux users and the Linux platform treated seriously.

He was barely insulting you by saying you troll the thread, you do.

 

You have made your point, we know at the moment serif will not be releasing products for Linux but what is your purpose here other than try to prevent there ever being a possibility? You say that a linux user who says your trolling is insulting you but you say Linux cannot be used by professions, has an average user base of 10 and often refer to linux users being geeks.

 

I honestly do not know the purpose of this thread whilst you are here constantly slating the linux community with your opinions. Is it for your post count or just egotistical?

Anyway, if you do not wish for serif to produce products for linux, great for you and we clearly know that is where you sit. So why not give the linux professionals to actually have their say.

 

Have a great day x   

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