Affinity products for Linux

[Kenzor]

https://vfxplatform.com/linux/

so vfx companies mostly use Linux according to a survey done by VES (the visual effects society. ) there’s a pdf with recommendations on Linux builds (commissioned because CentOS is end of life ) 

while I understand that making affinity cross platform in Linux as well would be a massive pain for the developers, it is a shame  because there few options for high end paint work under Linux

[geenat]

Quote

while I understand that making affinity cross platform in Linux as well would be a massive pain for the developers

🙄 Stop yourself. These are poorly informed assumptions in 2022.

As a developer who has worked with Mono on Linux on multiple occasions, I find it difficult to buy this excuse in 2022 because:

* In Affinity's case, Mono is particularly well supported on Linux, but we even have straight up .NET now. This has been the case for some time now. (Unity 3D, OpenRA, etc.) The Mac version probably already uses the same backend. 🙄

* For distribution, AppImage format works, is used by both Krita and Inkscape highly successfully.

I'm more inclined to believe there just aren't any Linux-inclined developers on staff, or resources are tight enough that its difficult for Affinity executive(s) to justify the Linux build. Once the initial legwork is done, continually pushing out a Linux build would be simple.

 

The very least Affinity can do is what they are doing now, attempting to guide people who are having this work in Bottles on Linux.

[1stn00b]

Their public filing history : https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02117968/filing-history doesn't show their about to go bankrupt, or struggling so i find it funny they can't afford better developers if the one they have are unfit to develop on other platforms like Android or Linux : > They have exactly 3 products that generate their income so their growth will come from increasing platform diversity, launching new products and off course a payed upgrade to version 2.0.

[Patrick Connor]

3 hours ago, 1stn00b said:

 so i find it funny they can't afford better developers if the one they have are unfit to develop on other platforms like Android or Linux : > 

Stop these insults, or leave the forums

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, 1stn00b said:

They have exactly 3 products that generate their income

There are currently eight products, not three, and there will be nine when Affinity Publisher on iPad is released.

[melina]

19 hours ago, geenat said:

I'm more inclined to believe there just aren't any Linux-inclined developers on staff, or resources are tight enough that its difficult for Affinity executive(s) to justify the Linux build.

Agreed. Affinity has made their position clear on this forum and Twitter, at least, that they are happy with the way things are. Quite frankly, it is their company which they formed to do what they wanted to do. As a business owner of more than 20 years, comments and suggestions are always welcome and occasionally, gratefully, implemented. However, nothing is more irritating than when someone waltzes into your company demanding that they rearrange the universe on their behalf. Whereas I am disappointed that there isn't an Affinity Suite for Linux, since native apps always work best, I respect their choices. And kudos to them for trying to help out people attempting alternate installations!😎

[D’T4ils]

4 hours ago, 1stn00b said:

i find it funny they can't afford better developers if the one they have are unfit to develop on other platforms like Android or Linux

Come on, mate! You’ve been of great help so far, this kind of comments is completely unnecessary. You’re spitting on the face of the people who’s giving us a hand with all this WINE stuff

[Renzatic]

Man. I was downloading Photo for a quick experiment, and I saw that I bought it in 2016. That was 6 years ago!

It made me feel old.

[Mark Ingram]

On 8/14/2022 at 12:49 PM, 1stn00b said:

i find it funny they can't afford better developers if the one they have are unfit to develop on other platforms like Android or Linux

I'm one of those engineers that you're insulting, and I'm also the only engineer to reply to the posts on this thread, trying to help out the community. My time is valuable, and I don't want to waste it reading comments like that.

[ShadeOn]

48 minutes ago, Mark Ingram said:

I'm one of those engineers that you're insulting, and I'm also the only engineer to reply to the posts on this thread, trying to help out the community. My time is valuable, and I don't want to waste it reading comments like that.

Agree here. Not one of us is the same (except some look alike the same, but are not that same/copy of previous soul that inhabited it)

On 8/4/2022 at 7:02 PM, 1stn00b said:

Running with terminal shows they use MoveFileTransactedW that Microsoft say will be deprecated and advises to not be used :

 

Then I am sure like others who didn't reply that you saw noob's finding about this function that you guys use and might affect on further Win 10/11 major updates (those "creative" updates that are each year but in reality it's a half-dusty format of refreshing the internal windows code, and previous versions won't be the same with new ones under the hood) and it already affects on this side too (wine/bottles), besides flickering (I think Wine devs should have some time to check this).

 

 

[Snapseed]

1 hour ago, Mark Ingram said:

I'm one of those engineers that you're insulting, and I'm also the only engineer to reply to the posts on this thread, trying to help out the community. My time is valuable, and I don't want to waste it reading comments like that.

Please be assured that your valuable input has been much appreciated by many of us who have read, or who have contributed to, this particular topic. Thank you.

[1stn00b]

I fail to understand how my "if then" comment insulted anybody, but so be it, i can get lost as i was instructed and get my relevant Affinity Linux/Android news from here : https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/careers/

[ShadeOn]

It is kind of a bad habit mix of words to be used in a phrase per se.

And I think now it's more crucial to find "soon be deprecated" core stuff that can affect future client versions on Windows and Mac (that can affect us too in Wine/Bottles) , then comes new features, and then (and only then) other stuff like Android, SailfishOS, etc.

Better be doing this while waters are calm now than when it's a stormy one and will lead to rash decisions

[Frozen Death Knight]

1 hour ago, 1stn00b said:

I fail to understand how my "if then" comment insulted anybody, but so be it, i can get lost as i was instructed and get my relevant Affinity Linux/Android news from here : https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/careers/

Well, you basically called the developers incompetent and the company they work for too poor to afford "good" developers, which is another slight towards the employees. It's not that hard to grasp.

[1stn00b]

On 8/13/2022 at 11:44 PM, geenat said:

I'm more inclined to believe there just aren't any Linux-inclined developers on staff, or resources are tight enough that its difficult for Affinity executive(s) to justify the Linux build.

My so called "insult" was a direct response to the comment above it.

[D’T4ils]

1 hour ago, 1stn00b said:

My so called "insult" was a direct response to the comment above it.

For the sake of this thread and what we’re all doing here, I need to ask you to stop “explaining” yourself. You were rude, so let’s just apologize and continue with the matter at hand

[HobbesHK]

Hi everyone, just stumbled onto this topic after doing a web search for "how to run Affinity Designer on Linux". The help provided here on how to get the bottle going on Linux has been invaluable - thank you everyone involved. Yes, it's flickering & I can't use a "save as" on a new file, but.... woooo, sooooo close! (Running Manjaro Linux 5.19 with an AMD RX 5700 XT)

I've got a Macbook right next to my PC, but would prefer to just run everything through Linux, so this topic has been very valuable - thank you!!

[Medical Officer Bones]

On 5/29/2022 at 10:35 AM, Kamei Kojirou said:

For my use case at least, I think Krita is the best photo editor on Linux. Which is hilarious because they don't claim to be one, but they are a fork of GIMP, so their is at least an older GIMP instance under the hood without the majority UI/UX issues of GIMP with better UI/UX, CYMK, non-destructive work, effect layers etc.  I think Krita is comparable to Affinity Photo, with a better painting experience, but the photo editing tools aren't well advertised and almost as good, the UI/UX is slightly worse because photo editing isn't the forefront, and their font tool has a weird popup interface to place text.

Krita is NOT a fork of GIMP. Quite the opposite, actually: back in 1998 Matthias Ettrich demonstrated how easy it was to hack a Qt GUI around an existing application, which happened to be GIMP. His patch was never published, and caused friction with the GIMP community at the time.

So because the GIMP community was unable to work together towards a better image editor, people in the KDE project decided to start their own image editor, called KImage. That was the start of Krita. and initially named "KImageShop", meant to be a GUI shell around ImageMagick. The name was then changed to "Krayon" due to existing trademark issues related to "KImageShop", and finally renamed to Krita in 2002.

All of which brings me to mention here that Krita 5.1 was just released.

Krita is wonderful to work with for drawing and painting, in my opinion.

[Kamei Kojirou]

36 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Krita is NOT a fork of GIMP. Quite the opposite, actually: back in 1998 Matthias Ettrich demonstrated how easy it was to hack a Qt GUI around an existing application, which happened to be GIMP. His patch was never published, and caused friction with the GIMP community at the time.

So because the GIMP community was unable to work together towards a better image editor, people in the KDE project decided to start their own image editor, called KImage. That was the start of Krita. and initially named "KImageShop", meant to be a GUI shell around ImageMagick. The name was then changed to "Krayon" due to existing trademark issues related to "KImageShop", and finally renamed to Krita in 2002.

All of which brings me to mention here that Krita 5.1 was just released.

Krita is wonderful to work with for drawing and painting, in my opinion.

Cool, thanks for clearing that up! It has some good photo editing abilities as well. That being said it is outstanding for drawing and painting.

[Snapseed]

10 hours ago, Kamei Kojirou said:

Cool, thanks for clearing that up! It has some good photo editing abilities as well. That being said it is outstanding for drawing and painting.

It has been said of Krita that, "It is a photoeditor hidden in paint application". Seriously though, it has a more sane and logical interface than Gimp does and if only Gimp could mimic the Krita way of doing things.

[Renzatic]

3 hours ago, Snapseed said:

It has been said of Krita that, "It is a photoeditor hidden in paint application". Seriously though, it has a more sane and logical interface than Gimp does and if only Gimp could mimic the Krita way of doing things.

It has adjustment layers. That alone puts it well above GIMP.

[Friksel]

On 8/4/2022 at 1:10 PM, PaulEC said:

These stats are for desktops, not tablets! (For tablets Windows has a much lower market share than iOS.)

I'm not talking about tablets either, but desktops with a monitor you can draw on. (to my knowledge Windows tablets-only don't even exists btw)

[azuredusk10]

I tried installing "Designer" via the steps listed on this thread:

I used the Flathub version of Bottles.

Unfortunately, after successfully installing Designer, it doesn't open. I chose the "Open with terminal" option, and this is what was output:

wineserver: using server-side synchronization.
002c:err:wineboot:process_run_key Error running cmd L"C:\\windows\\system32\\winemenubuilder.exe -r" (2).
0120:err:ole:CoGetContextToken apartment not initialised
0160:err:vulkan:wine_vk_instance_load_physical_devices Failed to enumerate physical devices, res=-3
0160:err:vulkan:wine_vkCreateInstance Failed to load physical devices, res=-3

It looks like vulkan couldn't work with my hardware. It's not the first time I've had this problem on my mid-2015 Macbook Pro 15" (MacBookPro11,5) with vulkan - the game Hades gave a similar vulkan error when I tried to run it.

Leaving this post here in case it's useful info for someone else.

[Kajac]

Hey guys. This is interesting for us!

So, recently I had to try to learn how to use some adobe tools (I hate using them) and I ended up discovering that they made extremely functional porting to linux, like a lot of things work correctly.

Does something from there not help to run affinity on linux?

Before anyone comes to talk about JackSparow stuff (Pirate of the Caribbean Software), I have access to Adobe's paid versions for studies, so I'm not here compacting with JackSparow stuff and I want to help run affinity on linux in a legal way, that is valid for any other tool!

Github link!

[wonderings]

On 8/14/2022 at 7:49 AM, 1stn00b said:

Their public filing history : https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02117968/filing-history doesn't show their about to go bankrupt, or struggling so i find it funny they can't afford better developers if the one they have are unfit to develop on other platforms like Android or Linux : > They have exactly 3 products that generate their income so their growth will come from increasing platform diversity, launching new products and off course a payed upgrade to version 2.0.

You sound like a very entitled Linux user. The only possible reason Affinity would not want to develop for Linux and Android is before they can't afford it? I know it is hard to believe but the majority of the world doesn't share your views on how great Linux is as an OS replacement for MacOS and Windows. It could be as simple as they don't see a return on investment for porting to Linux, advertising, support, etc. The market is very small for Linux, the userbase itself is small, and even smaller still for those who would want or need the type of software Affinity is selling. They have plenty of room to grow in the markets they are currently selling, I would hazard a guess that there is more to be earned with Mac and Windows users vs bringing in a completely new market from the Linux community.