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Affinity products for Linux


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16 hours ago, Renzatic said:

Paint.net is a fairly basic program, isn't it? Nowhere near what AP and Photoshop offer.

To be fair to it, is much easier to use than Gimp that comes with a distinct learning curve plus it has loads of plugins to enhance its capabilities including G'mic, Topaz filters and other Photoshop filters. It is also free and donations are welcome.

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1 hour ago, Snapseed said:

To be fair to it, is much easier to use than Gimp that comes with a distinct learning curve plus it has loads of plugins to enhance its capabilities including G'mic, Topaz filters and other Photoshop filters. It is also free and donations are welcome.

The Topaz filters sound interesting, but otherwise it doesn't look like it does much beyond what Krita offers natively.

Photoline, on the other hand, is actually pretty snazzy. Once I spent some time banging on the UI to make it a little nicer looking and easier to navigate, it's really good. It covers the things Krita falls short in, and does it all a lot faster.

Course I'd still rather have Photo and Designer, but until that day comes when I can use them in Linux, PL will cover me quite nicely.

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4 hours ago, Renzatic said:

The Topaz filters sound interesting, but otherwise it doesn't look like it does much beyond what Krita offers natively.

Photoline, on the other hand, is actually pretty snazzy. Once I spent some time banging on the UI to make it a little nicer looking and easier to navigate, it's really good. It covers the things Krita falls short in, and does it all a lot faster.

Course I'd still rather have Photo and Designer, but until that day comes when I can use them in Linux, PL will cover me quite nicely.

It is really excellent news that you have found a practical and capable alternative right now that works well 🙂

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55 minutes ago, Snapseed said:

It is really excellent news that you have found a practical and capable alternative right now that works well 🙂

Well...uh...if you want to know a secret, I've since decided to dual boot.

Not that this'll stop me from harassing people here for Affinity Linux. 

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10 minutes ago, Renzatic said:

Well...uh...if you want to know a secret, I've since decided to dual boot.

Then that means you can use Affinity Photo, etc, right?

Personally, I wouldn't go down that dual boot route but I would use, and buy, software was native Linux or that worked well with CrossOver/Wine.

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9 minutes ago, Snapseed said:

Then that means you can use Affinity Photo, etc, right?

Personally, I wouldn't go down that dual boot route but I would use, and buy, software was native Linux or that worked well with CrossOver/Wine.

Yup. I was about to buy PL, but I couldn't shake the idea that I already own exactly what I want. It's just not in my preferred OS.

So here I am, back in the world of janky font rendering, and clunky window management (seriously, why can't MS, with all the talent available to them, make task view animate smoothly), but all my preferred programs are immediately available.

Wish I could have my cake, and eat it too. Best I can do for now is split the difference.  

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18 hours ago, Renzatic said:

Yup. I was about to buy PL, but I couldn't shake the idea that I already own exactly what I want. It's just not in my preferred OS.

So here I am, back in the world of janky font rendering, and clunky window management (seriously, why can't MS, with all the talent available to them, make task view animate smoothly), but all my preferred programs are immediately available.

Wish I could have my cake, and eat it too. Best I can do for now is split the difference.  

It turns out that at WineHQ, the most recent versions of PhotoLine that were tested got the best possible Platinum rating for working well with Wine and here's a quote from one satisfied user, "PhotoLine is rock solid on my Wine. Awesome stuff!".

^ I'd like to see that too for Affinity Photo.

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It ran perfectly. I decided to give it a roll here in Windows, and there's no difference in look or performance whatsoever.

One of the reasons why I'd assume it runs so well in Wine is because it looks like it's leveraging oldschool Windows APIs, not really pushing the box in any way as far as GPU and interface niceties are concerned.  Meanwhile, the Affinity suite leans on the more modern standards, which Wine doesn't support nearly so well. It makes for a great experience when you can use it, but sorta sucks when those nice features keep you from hopping OSes.

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23 minutes ago, Renzatic said:

Wow. People still do that? That's impressive.

And there are only two programmers, who are brothers. Look at the major and dot release threads on the website. It's impressive what the two can do.

The upgrades, one major version to another, are about $30. I've used PL for many versions. 

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27 minutes ago, MikeW said:

And there are only two programmers, who are brothers. Look at the major and dot release threads on the website. It's impressive what the two can do.

The upgrades, one major version to another, are about $30. I've used PL for many versions. 

Now I might have to buy it out of pure respect for the skillz on display.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 4/29/2021 at 6:38 PM, msdobrescu said:

They are indeed interesting statistics and now all the world's 500 top supercomputers run on Linux which displaced assorted Unix variants such as IBM AIX, etc (OS X, BSD and Windows were just not contenders there).

For us, the really important figure is the desktop market share and last summer Netmarketshare (they have now stopped collecting data) was reporting the Linux figure as 3.6% desktop market compared with 9.2% for macOS and 86.7% for Windows and that relatively low Linux market share is why many general commercial software providers are reluctant to make their software products available for Linux. That said, l hope that at some stage the Serif Affinity product range can become available on Linux via Wine/Crossover.

Finally, Linux has gone where macOS and Windows cannot go and Linux can be now be found on two planets since the Ingenuity helicopter that's been flying on Mars has a Linux operating system:

 

 

LinuxCopter.jpg

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On 4/8/2021 at 11:53 AM, Snapseed said:

In your case, it might be worth trying out the native Linux Pixeluvo software and/or the Windows version of PhotoLine with CrossOver/Wine and see how you get on with those two softwares.

Thank you for suggesting PhotoLine! Why didn't I try this sooner? Maybe because I sort-of lost hope? Read through the other positive comments on it and gave it a go.

Transformation operations surprisingly performs REALLY well on high-resolutions. I work with 9k images. Big plus, it even opens .EXR files. Not multi-layered .EXRs (unless I'm overlooking something) but single would do fine. I tried with ProEXR plugin but it crashes on my end.

I couldn't find a simple gamma operation until I found White-Point under Filters > Digital Camera, and works as expected (if you need to set to .33).

The tools feel so good! I can finally work like how I'm supposed to.

Since it's written in Assembly I don't think it's resource intensive. Anyway, this will be my go-to workhorse.

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On 5/9/2021 at 10:48 PM, pbaroque20 said:

Thank you for suggesting PhotoLine! Why didn't I try this sooner? Maybe because I sort-of lost hope? Read through the other positive comments on it and gave it a go.

Transformation operations surprisingly performs REALLY well on high-resolutions. I work with 9k images. Big plus, it even opens .EXR files. Not multi-layered .EXRs (unless I'm overlooking something) but single would do fine. I tried with ProEXR plugin but it crashes on my end.

I couldn't find a simple gamma operation until I found White-Point under Filters > Digital Camera, and works as expected (if you need to set to .33).

The tools feel so good! I can finally work like how I'm supposed to.

Since it's written in Assembly I don't think it's resource intensive. Anyway, this will be my go-to workhorse.

^ This is excellent news and that software ought to be better known, especially since it can work well on Linux with Wine. Indeed, I'd like to see it bundled up with Wine as an easy to install Snap from the Ubuntu Software Center just like PhotoScape is.

If anyone else is considering trying out this software then there are a couple of introductory guides out there for PhotoLine in English:

http://www.russellcottrell.com/photo/PhotoLine/downloads/PhotoLineTutorial.pdf

http://evrencomert.com/PhotoLine.htm

If anyone needs further advice and assistance then help forums are available in both English and German.

And now here is a screenshot of PhotoLine in action:

 

PhotoLine.jpg

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  • 1 month later...

But Windows 10 is such a pain! Upgrades that destabilise the parts that used to work smoothly. Lots of time wasted trying to get back to how those things worked. Time that would have been better spent on the other 1001 things that need doing. I'm seriously considering leaving Windows.

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21 hours ago, Eryka said:

But Windows 10 is such a pain! Upgrades that destabilise the parts that used to work smoothly. Lots of time wasted trying to get back to how those things worked. Time that would have been better spent on the other 1001 things that need doing. I'm seriously considering leaving Windows.

 

Mădălin Vlad
Graphic Designer
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On 10/2/2017 at 11:21 AM, Guest said:

Can I ask why? You won't make version for Linux even despite the fact that linux popularity is higher than mac now?

Oh, don't be such a commercial baybee !

Serif doesn't want us bad boys from Linux hacking away at its lovely little happy-appy.

So we're all off to bed at 5 pm and no supper.

And you cawn't upload any user profile data till you have at least 100 posts . . .

wailer.jpg

Edited by tamjk
Important coda
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  • 4 weeks later...
On 7/23/2021 at 1:53 AM, Unleavened Tech said:

1. "Affinity products are used by photographers and graphic designers, and Linux is used by developers. Therefore it wouldn't be profitable enough."

You have to understand that your software is not only being used by photographers and graphic designers, just like how a text editor is not only used by writers and journalists. A raster image editing software is an everyday tool for all kinds of people. Software developers, who you say use Linux, do often need to make changes to image files contained in their program. It might not be as involved of a work than a photographer would do, but they still need the basic tools offered by image editing programs. Indie developers and people doing personal/hobby projects will also need to do branding and designing icons on their own.

GIMP+Inkscape would suffice for general software developers, but there are so many other fields that would benefit from Affinity products: games development for Linux of FX. I bet the ones having a Linux farm or simply few computers would use them.

On 7/23/2021 at 1:53 AM, Unleavened Tech said:

2. "It would cost $500,000 to port Affinity to Linux."

If it would cost that much to port a software, you are seriously doing something wrong. $500,000 is a lot of money even for creating a piece of software from scratch. We understand that porting the UI requires a lot of work due to the library being used, however as pointed out by multiple people, Serif could work with CodeWeavers to make Affinity work on Linux through a Windows compatibility layer. This would still require work, but it would be substantially less. The Linux version could still be sold separately.

I think it would, but would also pay.

On 7/23/2021 at 1:53 AM, Unleavened Tech said:

3. "Linux users only use free & open-source software and refuse to use anything that is proprietary or you have to pay for."

While this is true for some Linux users, those users don't use free and open-source software because they use Linux, it's the other way around, they use Linux because it's free and open-source software. Most people using Linux do not mind running *good* proprietary software. On Linux there is an official, proprietary driver for Nvidia graphics cards and there is an open-source implementation - the proprietary driver is actually used by more people, because it is better. One of the most popular and much glorified distributions among Linux-enthusiasts, Arch Linux, actually endorses both open-source and proprietary software and you can actually install a lot of proprietary applications straight from the official Arch repositories.

I think the FOSS extremists are not in question here, they don't ask for Linux versions here anyway and don't work in the fields in discussion for sure.

On 7/23/2021 at 1:53 AM, Unleavened Tech said:

4. "Because there are so many Linux distributions, we would have to release a package for each of them."

Wrong. Flatpaks run on all Linux distributions and are preferred by a lot of people because of their security model and self-containment. AppImages are the equivalent of Windows' portable applications and can be run on any distribution just by downloading them, enabling execution in properties and double clicking on their icon.

Indeed, those are very trendy now, despite they depend a lot on the OS too binaries, would not be a problem.

On 7/23/2021 at 1:53 AM, Unleavened Tech said:

5. "Linux already has GIMP and their users are not going to switch to Affinity Photo."

A lot of people don't want to use GIMP because it is a very poorly made program in terms of UI and UX - even Edward Snowden pointed that out. And as you can clearly see in this thread, there are a lot of people who would like to use Affinity over GIMP, and are turning to Photo-Line instead of GIMP as an alternative. GIMP is a software commonly used in schools and educations, and the most common reaction from students (and even teachers) is "Photoshop is much better, why do we have to use this piece of 💩?" Also, a lot of gamers who are going to use Linux because the Steam Deck are young students who would not like to use GIMP, and would be looking at other alternatives to Photoshop.

I know from experience that the GIMP workflow is about three times slower by comparison to Photoshop/Affinity, so I would pay for any of those under Linux.

Steam Deck is something to see in the next year... I hope will be as advertised and more, but I'm a desktop guy.

But Microsoft did an interesting move: they drop IE, so Adobe needs to move it's authentication away from it in their CC. What should that be? Edge? There's an Edge for Linux in beta. Chrome? That would be more cross platform as it already exists under MacOS. Their own? Either way, they may have an accessible solution soon and it's know that the latest PS runs fine under Wine, all it's stopping us is the IE integration. This niche may close soon.

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1 hour ago, msdobrescu said:

GIMP+Inkscape would suffice for general software developers, but there are so many other fields that would benefit from Affinity products: games development for Linux of FX. I bet the ones having a Linux farm or simply few computers would use them.

I think it would, but would also pay.

I think the FOSS extremists are not in question here, they don't ask for Linux versions here anyway and don't work in the fields in discussion for sure.

Indeed, those are very trendy now, despite they depend a lot on the OS too binaries, would not be a problem.

I know from experience that the GIMP workflow is about three times slower by comparison to Photoshop/Affinity, so I would pay for any of those under Linux.

Steam Deck is something to see in the next year... I hope will be as advertised and more, but I'm a desktop guy.

But Microsoft did an interesting move: they drop IE, so Adobe needs to move it's authentication away from it in their CC. What should that be? Edge? There's an Edge for Linux in beta. Chrome? That would be more cross platform as it already exists under MacOS. Their own? Either way, they may have an accessible solution soon and it's know that the latest PS runs fine under Wine, all it's stopping us is the IE integration. This niche may close soon.

MS is also on the cusp of another interesting move: Windows 365 Cloud PC (not to be confused with Microsoft 365, which is the new MSOffice), which will allow ANY computer with an internet browser to run a cloud-based windows desktop. So the new solution for Linux users: install Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher on your browser-accessible Windows desktop! (Instead of a CC sub, now you’ll need a Windows 365 Cloud sub.)

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17 minutes ago, CedarBluffGraphics&Layout said:

MS is also on the cusp of another interesting move: Windows 365 Cloud PC (not to be confused with Microsoft 365, which is the new MSOffice), which will allow ANY computer with an internet browser to run a cloud-based windows desktop. So the new solution for Linux users: install Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher on your browser-accessible Windows desktop! (Instead of a CC sub, now you’ll need a Windows 365 Cloud sub.)

That's a no for me!

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I use Linux every day as a programmer and web designer. I have already bought all Affinity products, but unfortunately I have to boot the Windows partition in order to be able to use them. So far I have failed with wine, I could still install vmware or virtualbox, but that is somehow not very satisfactory. In short, I'm already a paying customer and I use Linux 99% of the time. I would be very happy if Affinity products would run on Linux.

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On 7/27/2021 at 1:14 PM, msdobrescu said:

I know from experience that the GIMP workflow is about three times slower by comparison to Photoshop/Affinity, so I would pay for any of those under Linux.

I recently fired up a beta rev for Gimp 3.0 (officially 2.99.6) to see if it's improved in any way.

On the plus side, since it's using the GTK 3.0+ toolkit, it now looks like a proper, professional app. From a presentation standpoint, I actually think it looks a little better than Photo. I can resize the color wheel!

On the negative side of things, it's still Gimp. No adjustment layers, no layer effects, and it still has that same slow as molasses workflow. Like why does it always have to pop up that dialog box when I make a new layer? JUST MAKE A FREAKING EMPTY LAYER!

So, in digest, new Gimp doesn't make me quite as angry as it used to, but using it still makes me want to punch stuff.

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