Affinity products for Linux

[wonderings]

16 hours ago, MattyWS said:

Agreed, it's very hard to pin down how many linux desktop users there are and it's hard to pin down how much of a profit Serif would get. Though the amount of support is similar to every other platform (though if anything you'd get more bug reports from linux users). Doesn't seem to be an issue for other software developers that have Linux versions so I don't know why it'd be a problem specifically for Serif. In the end it costs money to develop software for any platform so it's up to serif what platforms they develop for, it's not up to me and it's not my problem either way. I'd prefer they made their software platform agnostic but it's Serifs project so eh.

It's pretty bizarre that Linux is only really missing a good photo editor, most other kinds of software is pretty much accounted for at least for me, as my job ranges from VFX to 3D art and 2D art which is a wide and vague range that you could probably just call the entire creative industry. Film, Games, Music, Software Development.. but not Photography? Why is that I wonder (genuinely, im not trying to make a point I am really curious why this gap exists).

No 2 companies are alike, so saying others do it so why can't Serif is not all that valid. Who knows what they are like internally, expanding into new OS territory would mean new staff and no issues to confront for questionable gains.

I know Adobe looked into Linux some years ago, did some internal study and in the end opted out of developing for Linux. I personally think this speaks volumes (at least for the time, though I don't think there has been significant growth to change much now) as Adobe is a company with the money and the means to go into Linux. Serif is a mom and pop shop in comparison, both in staffing and revenue. If Adobe found it would not yield significant returns (my assumption) then I would say that probably goes for Serif as well, Serif who has less money to burn and less staff to take on the headaches that would come with a new OS.

 

[MattyWS]

5 hours ago, Pšenda said:

You have a mistake in your calculations again - wanting to use and buy is not the same. The license for Affinity applications is lifetime, so I can upgrade my desktop several times, but I still use the same license.

True it's certainly an unknown variable. Though thats kinda true about every OS and it's really a fault of Serif if thats an issue for them. I don't want Serif to go all subscription model on us though so I guess worst case is Serif have paid upgrades to whole number versions (affinity photo 2 comes out and it's a £50 purchase to get the new version until Affinity photo 3, however you can still use the old versions since you paid for the lifetime license). Or do what most software do and limit the seats on the license so people with 3 macs will have to pay for extra seats if they want to use affinity photo across all their macs...

[MattyWS]

19 hours ago, wonderings said:

No 2 companies are alike, so saying others do it so why can't Serif is not all that valid.

 

I disagree.. every company has to consider the pros and cons of platforms and how much money they need to spend on staffing. We've established Linux is used by a lot of the creative industry as well so I think it's fair to compare other companies that make creative softwares to this company that also makes creative softwares and just because Adobe does or doesn't do something doesn't mean anything more or less for Serif.

 

You say adobe don't develop for linux so why should serif? Well Adobe also specialize in 3D, game development, film production, music etc etc so if Serif are copying them then maybe they should waste money on making software like that too, right? Either they copy Adobe or they don't I don't think you can have it both ways. This may just be a difference in opinion but Serif have said they don't want to be compared to Adobe. I mean if we're going there then why even use Affinity products at all if Adobe exists? Serif *need* to do things differently to Adobe to stand out otherwise they may as well not exist.

The numbers of professionals who use Affinity Photo compared to Photoshop are probably on par with the numbers of people who use Windows or Linux. May as well expand into a new platform where Adobe doesn't exist.

Anyways this really comes down to opinions in the end. Other companies have thrived while making a Linux version of their software I don't think it will kill Serif, but ultimately it's their choice and heck, Serif already make choices that are extreme opposites of what I'd consider good (no good alpha/channel editing? No real support for channel packing? Basic stuff people need that serif claim no one needs and so they don't want to include it). Nothing I or anyone can do other than voice their wants and needs and it's on the whim of serif to decide to listen or not.

I dont think I or anyone else needs to convince the forum users here if Linux is a good idea. You guys are entitled to like Windows or Mac and nothing else but it's still super weird how passionate some people are about hating Linux for no gain.

[Old Bruce]

On 6/20/2022 at 5:46 AM, MattyWS said:

Even if just 1% of that userbase wanted to use affinity photo (not including the rest of the suit) thats 50,000 sales a year,

 

20 minutes ago, MattyWS said:

True it's certainly an unknown variable. Though thats kinda true about every OS and it's really a fault of Serif if thats an issue for them. I don't want Serif to go all subscription model on us though so I guess worst case is Serif have paid upgrades to whole number versions (affinity photo 2 comes out and it's a £50 purchase to get the new version until Affinity photo 3, however you can still use the old versions since you paid for the lifetime license). Or do what most software do and limit the seats on the license so people with 3 macs will have to pay for extra seats if they want to use affinity photo across all their macs...

You have still not addressed the mistake you make in your calculations. Five million new Linux boxes are not all new users. Some of those are replacement machines. You would need to know how many, is if just one percent or is it half of the machines. Don't guess and make assumptions without using error bars. So it is 49,999 or 25,000. Perhaps only 2,500 new sales for the five million machines. 

[Komatös]

And the bill has another fundamental flaw. None of the assumed 50,000 Linux users will purchase new programmes every year. Serif, however, depends on getting new customers. And in the desktop segment, these are mainly Windows and Mac users. 

[Old Bruce]

16 minutes ago, MattyWS said:

Serif already make choices that are extreme opposites of what I'd consider good (no good alpha/channel editing? No real support for channel packing? Basic stuff people need that serif claim no one needs and so they don't want to include it).

And again there is the solution of gathering like minded individuals and make a far superior graphics suite for Linux. Yammering on about how a not very good piece of software should be ported to Linux seems like a bad idea. Make something better.

[LondonSquirrel]

46 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

And again there is the solution of gathering like minded individuals and make a far superior graphics suite for Linux. Yammering on about how a not very good piece of software should be ported to Linux seems like a bad idea. Make something better.

Some people in the Linux world would insist on Affinity being open source before they would use it. It's just a lot of noise and hassle to deal with. The desktop Linux market is tiny, and the number of people within that tiny market who would buy Affinity's products is also tiny. Mathematics: tinyNumber/tinyNumber = tinyTinyNumber.

[Old Bruce]

16 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Mathematics: tinyNumber/tinyNumber = tinyTinyNumber.

<Pedant on>

The correct name for the result is TeenyTinyNumber

<Pedant Off>

Proper terms are Small, Tiny, Teeny, Itsy, Itsy-bitsy and less than nothing.

[Kajac]

For some it is difficult to understand.

Even though the serif doesn't create a native version for linux.

They are fully capable of helping to make it work correctly in PlayOnLinux and Lutris!

The big question, how difficult is that? The costs would be low if we remember that it wouldn't be a native version, let alone need to advertise about it!

How difficult is it to give a little help to run the tool correctly?

I think if they are not going to help with at least minimal support, it would be better if they close this topic soon and make it clear that they have no interest in it working on linux, in any way!

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, Kajac said:

I think if they are not going to help with at least minimal support, it would be better if they close this topic soon and make it clear that they have no interest in it working on linux, in any way!

They have already said they're not interested. And if they were to close this topic, someone would just start another one.

22 minutes ago, Kajac said:

They are fully capable of helping to make it work correctly in PlayOnLinux and Lutris!

The big question, how difficult is that? The costs would be low if we remember that it wouldn't be a native version, let alone need to advertise about it!

If they can make it work, the next question would be will it perform well enough. And the one after that will be can they keep it working with future updates, and how much effort will that take?

And if it doesn't perform well, or has bugs that don't happen in a supported environment, or breaks with a future update, how angry will the users be who paid for it because they'd heard it works, or tried it and found it worked. And then it didn't, one day.

[MattyWS]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

If they can make it work, the next question would be will it perform well enough. And the one after that will be can they keep it working with future updates, and how much effort will that take?

And if it doesn't perform well, or has bugs that don't happen in a supported environment, or breaks with a future update, how angry will the users be who paid for it because they'd heard it works, or tried it and found it worked. And then it didn't, one day.

Well this is literally the method used by Valve and all game developers who are making their games compatible via Proton(wine). It makes sense tbh, using a compatibility layer means needing less effort on the developers part to support the linux platform. The same goes for Mac with Rosetta.

[LondonSquirrel]

1 hour ago, MattyWS said:

The same goes for Mac with Rosetta.

It is nothing like Rosetta. Rosetta is for translating between different CPU architectures, with a corresponding drop in performance. If you run an app built for M1 on M1 it will perform better than an app built for Intel running on M1 using Rosetta. Rosetta is a stepping stone with the eventual intention that you move to apps natively built for M1.

[Kajac]

17 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

They have already said they're not interested. And if they were to close this topic, someone would just start another one.

But you might change your mind because this topic has been around for 5 years.

They are the owners of the forum, they can create a script or the moderation itself to close the linux topics as they already do!

17 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

If they can make it work, the next question would be will it perform well enough. And the one after that will be can they keep it working with future updates, and how much effort will that take?

And if it doesn't perform well, or has bugs that don't happen in a supported environment, or breaks with a future update, how angry will the users be who paid for it because they'd heard it works, or tried it and found it worked. And then it didn't, one day.

That's it... Today people are already able to make some older versions of Affinity Designer work through PlayOnLinux and Lutris, something that sometimes depending on the distro has bugs that the user can't solve, at that moment I would enter the SERIF with minimal support , as the problems I have are things I can't disable from within the tool.

So how difficult would it be to provide support?

Today heavy and problematic games like League OF Legends and GTA V run on linux, using PlayOnLinux and Lutris.

Valve has Proton which is a free project and does not create the game from scratch.

There are ways to make it work! But is it really that difficult to provide minimal support?

Edited June 23, 2022 by Kajac

[walt.farrell]

19 minutes ago, Kajac said:

But is it really that difficult to provide minimal support?

Yes, because there really is no such thing as "minimal" support. The users who paid for the applications will expect everything to work, with good performance. The need to keep the applications working will affect all future development, and the timing of that development, on the platforms that Serif really wants to support: Windows, Mac, and iPad.

[Kajac]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Yes, because there really is no such thing as "minimal" support. The users who paid for the applications will expect everything to work, with good performance. The need to keep the applications working will affect all future development, and the timing of that development, on the platforms that Serif really wants to support: Windows, Mac, and iPad.

I partially disagree with what you're saying.

SERIF is fully capable of providing support to run.

Even if it is using Linux X, with kernel X and with minimum hardware X.

PlayOnLinux and Lutris are here!

Regarding performance, there's nowhere to flee, both in windows and macOS have limitations, especially if we take into account the end user's hardware!

----------------------------

Anyway, for users who defend against, I still don't see any sense in it! Why don't you want it to run on linux?

[Kamei Kojirou]

3 minutes ago, Kajac said:

I partially disagree with what you're saying.

SERIF is fully capable of providing support to run.

Even if it is using Linux X, with kernel X and with minimum hardware X.

PlayOnLinux and Lutris are here!

Regarding performance, there's nowhere to flee, both in windows and macOS have limitations, especially if we take into account the end user's hardware!

----------------------------

Anyway, for users who defend against, I still don't see any sense in it! Why don't you want it to run on linux?

Support costs time, money, and resources. There is no such thing as minimal support. It's either supported or not. If people pay for a product they are going to rightfully expect it to work with full support. All that being said it needs to make sense business-wise to them. Trust me, it's not as easy as just lightly sorting it out on PlayonLinux and Lutris. There is a reason they have different versions and operating systems on listed on WINEHQ. This isn't just about hitting a few toggles and making it work on all Distros. WineHQ and Proton are working miracles but you need to keep in mind most games have somewhat similar requirements, which is why you are likely under the impression this would be a quick and easy process as support for games seems to quick these days. Support and workarounds will come eventually to Wine, but it will come from those communities, and likely not Serif. The reason Affinity line isn't working properly right now there some core dlls that aren't supported yet in WINE. I'm not defending against Affinity coming to Linux, but it needs to make sense. I say that as a full-time user of Linux and someone who has bought Photo, Designer, and Publisher and not using them in favor of native alternatives on Linux and would likely buy Affinity Photo again if it had full Linux support.

[walt.farrell]

37 minutes ago, Kajac said:

Why don't you want it to run on linux?

I would be happy for it to run on Linux, under Wine, if the Wine community can make it happen.

 

 

[The Letter M]

On 10/2/2017 at 9:48 AM, - S - said:

The market share doubled in two months, which seems odd. Perhaps it's all those system admins downloading Ubuntu/openSUSE/SLES from the Windows Store and playing with Linux subsystem on Windows.   However, it's worth bearing in mind not just market share in absolute numbers, but also the popularity of Mac's amongst creatives and in the creative industry, which market share alone doesn't reflect.

 

As a Linux admin myself, I see a lot of kids who run Linux in Virtualbox too.

[msdobrescu]

I trust this: https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/

I believe this is paid by the Linux Corporation: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/linux-operating-system-market-103037

[Komatös]

Don't trust any statistics that you haven't falsified yourself. 🤣

Why hasn't Microsoft ported its Office Suite to Linux long ago, even though it would be easy to use the Mac version for it? Why doesn't Steinberg develop their music editing programmes for Linux?  Well, because there are too few customers who would pay for it.

[Pšenda]

For some, these two completely different terms are difficult to distinguish.

26 minutes ago, Komatös said:

Well, because there are too few customers who would pay for it.

On 6/20/2022 at 11:15 AM, MattyWS said:

in all fairness, the number of linux users is in the several billions

 

P.S. The number of users mentioned in the context of potential Photoshop users is particularly funny.

 

[msdobrescu]

3 hours ago, Komatös said:

Don't trust any statistics that you haven't falsified yourself. 🤣

Why hasn't Microsoft ported its Office Suite to Linux long ago, even though it would be easy to use the Mac version for it? Why doesn't Steinberg develop their music editing programmes for Linux?  Well, because there are too few customers who would pay for it.

No idea about Steinberg, MS Office I don't need as LibreOffice has all I need. Also RawTherapee or DarkTable and Hugin are fine, I just need a better panorama application and Photoshop was so good so far. The irony is Photoshop works fine under Linux, its integration with the logon is the problem, technically, to run it under Wine.

[Komatös]

And yet Photoshop is and remains a desktop application for Windows or macOS. And wine is just an emulator that doesn't even come close to the performance of a native application.

And all the other applications you listed are OSS and free. The developers of these programs are mostly working here on a voluntary basis. But Serif and Adobe have to make money. And with OSS it is like with a commercial kitchen .... many cooks spoil the broth.

[msdobrescu]

Well, if you wonder how did I got using them, is not because they are free.

At the time, as student, I used MS Office to write my papers, eventually I was writing a book to help my fellow students use Visual FoxPro. I was organizing it, doing complex layouts, adding images etc.. After 300 pages, it simply broke. All the stuff went mixed. A glitch in MS Office. I have rearranged it, it blew again. This time I had backup copies.

So I have tried StarOffice. Was great and did the same things. Was not free at the time, there was no much Internet, I have payed the shipping and the media too. But switched away from MS Office. So it began. I use LibreOffice now, even for backward compatibility with old MS Office documents that can't be opened anymore with the current versions.

The other apps were also done with a reason, a need not related to the no need of no cost to access it. They are doing things in their ways to achieve specific goals. They are more precise in some regards. For a photography hobbyist is enough. I've seen pros using them too. Even for stock photography. Let's say its a momentum to still use PS, but not a true necessity.

Also the freedom. The system does not spend resources on metering and assessing the user, while the user pays for that. Not to mention selling this data. And you don't own your copy as it can be revoked and not even refunded or may lose access to your work too.

Usually, when you pay for software, it's clear what you need, because you start asking for specific features. FOSS is more open, there you find more requests, the help the community to express. It's also imperfect, but I find it more reliable in matter of expectations. If I ask a paid software maker do I get what I ask for? Not necessarily. So I chose based on my needs, not on the price or the fact that if I pay for it would be a warranty of some sort.

[MattyWS]

16 minutes ago, Komatös said:

And yet Photoshop is and remains a desktop application for Windows or macOS. And wine is just an emulator that doesn't even come close to the performance of a native application.

I hate to be that guy but wine isn't an emulator, it's literally in the name. Applications running through wine vary from being borked to actually running faster via wine linux than on windows natively. Wine will only really get better and more efficient over time. Protons the same, in some games I play, playing via proton on linux yields better performance with far more FPS, much to my surprise. It's magic to me as I have no idea really how it works but it's just a translation layer, not an emulator (which usually require your hardware specs be far beyond that of the platform you're trying to emulate).