Affinity products for Linux

[jammer2000b]

I guess the question is has anyone been able to save from Designer while running from bottles?  I see some questions about it, but it is hard to tell if there has been any success on that front.

[alexleduc]

I would buy it all again in a heartbeat if it was made for Linux, but to be honest I'd prefer they ported it to Electron as a proof of concept and then hosted it on the cloud like Figma did before it was gobbled up by Adobe for 20 Billion. The writing is on the wall for desktop apps developed for a particular OS. Affinity Designer could become the #1 competitor to Figma overnight if was a cloud/browser-based product. We don't need this to be ported to Linux if it runs in a Web browser.

 

[alexleduc]

22 minutes ago, alexleduc said:

I would buy it all again in a heartbeat if it was made for Linux, but to be honest I'd prefer they ported it to Electron as a proof of concept and then hosted it on the cloud like Figma did before it was gobbled up by Adobe for 20 Billion. The writing is on the wall for desktop apps developed for a particular OS. Affinity Designer could become the #1 competitor to Figma overnight if was a cloud/browser-based product. We don't need this to be ported to Linux if it runs in a Web browser.

 

Linux has Chrome (and all Chromium-based derivatives like Edge, Vivaldi, Brave), Firefox and some Webkit-based browsers (Safari's engine).

Figma was eating both Adobe and Serif's lunches. Now it only eats Serif's lunch. The advantages of sharing and co-editing documents in the cloud in a web-based tool is where growth is. A transition is going on.

[ShadeOn]

Yes, Adobe bought Figma (announced at the end of September 2022) . This means there is a chance that Adobe will increase price and the free stuff will become more limited than what Figma has to offer now (at the time of writing) (or they add some new free stuff but step by step will reduce them again).

Figma done a good job until now, offering a good experience free usage so that new Web Designers that enter this job domain to feel safe, able to use all tools available and have a decent portfolio to show off at job offerings. And best of all... if you can't pay monthly anymore, you are still able to have access to the projects and tools (in free use mode, which is acceptable). Companies buy the standard monthly fees as a ~donation~ for the continuous development.

I am sure that Adobe will somehow play with Figma to modify/adapt it to be closer to Illustrator alternative (or rename it altogether), since they already have the online Photoshop variant, and only Illustrator and InDesign is still needed to have the full suite adapted for online. I do go forth and speculate they will make also a Figma clone to create a InDesign variant.

If the limitation will start to roll out or prices will go up in Adobe expensive style, we already get ready to save the projects and move on to other options.

Currently, the closest project near Figma capabilities and experience is this : https://penpot.app/ , and it's in beta (time of writing)

To be honest.. I prefer to use offline tools as backup, especially since most countries warn people to get blankets, candles and canned food cause of possible blackouts that could be hours or days. This wouldn't be a problem if some teammates can't join for the time being if they get unlucky, but it would really be a big problem if the connection to the main server is affected by the offline status, cause it affects the productivity altogether. I don't want to enter the e-mail or the login verification subject (if it is on another server, in another country, and if it's 2 steps verification and e-mail server is down.. you can't login into the app for work) cause it has many scenarios.

[1stn00b]

And like i said before :

On 7/1/2022 at 11:05 PM, 1stn00b said:

Also since Serif business model is to sell a unique non-sharable license on every platform they support i'm 100% sure not only that they won't support the Wine community, but make sure in the future that their Windows Apps will never install on Wine again : >

They fixed us by packaging the new V2 Affinity software as MSIX crapware 

[jaizon]

6 minutes ago, 1stn00b said:

They fixed us by packaging the new V2 Affinity software as MSIX crapware 

Is it available already?

 

Never mind, just saw it on official website, gonna test out to see if it's worth switching now!

[MattyWS]

3 hours ago, 1stn00b said:

And like i said before :

They fixed us by packaging the new V2 Affinity software as MSIX crapware 

is that to say that this MSIX will not be installable on linux via wine at all? D: I had high hopes. I purchased the full v2 suite anyway in the hopes it might work on linux, but I do have an ipad/thinking of getting a macbook as well so it's no major loss... but I do daily drive linux so it'd kinda suck if the devs went a route that blocks us entirely

[j0e.org]

We just got a "V2", but no Linux support and no DAM. Nothing new...

[1stn00b]

Well i just booted into W10 and got this :

 

So yeah great V2 indeed : >

Isn't the point of msix pakage format to provide all necesary dependencies like i have with Flatpak ?  What a shitshow

 

[Kamei Kojirou]

Honestly, I'm not surprised. They have made it very clear this isn't a platform they want to support and that's totally fine and their choice. That being said, I love what they are doing by being an alternative to Adobe's subscription model. But I also won't be buying software that doesn't work on the platform I use either, and that's cool too.

 

[jaizon]

14 minutes ago, j0e.org said:

Nothing new...

I don'y know hat you mean, we got build tool, linked assets, non-destructive raw edits, new live-filters, new masks based on color and luminosity, and the list goes on...
The fact that it is not installable on Linux sucks though, we were almost there. I hope there's a fix.

[1stn00b]

RAW Therapee & Darktable do non-destructive raw edits and much more and give you creative freedom on all PC platforms for free : >

[ShadeOn]

If it's something that not even Wine currently can handle, it means they had a stormy weather to rush things (like I stated in some posts ago) for a reason (or majority won who voted for functionality over flexibility).

When you indeed need it, I can only sum up that until CrossOver will check on this topic, VMware or equivalent (virtual machines) are the only valid options with Windows 10 on it (since the V2 I see them having dropped Win 8.1 (and 7) from the list, which is not good... at least 8.1 should have still been on the list).

And btw.. I don't see anywhere something about half price discount for those who own V1 and want to upgrade , only the limited time offer on time of writing this post.

 

 

[jaizon]

1 hour ago, ShadeOn said:

at least 8.1 should have still been

Nope, Microsoft will only support W10 e W11 starting next year, no one is gonna support W7 and 8.1 anymore. Even Chrome will drop the support for them!

7 hours ago, 1stn00b said:

RAW Therapee & Darktable do non-destructive raw edits and much more and give you creative freedom on all PC platforms for free : >

I didn't quite get why you mentioned these two softwares, I mean, if you want to compare AP with a free software that should be either GIMP or Krita, which none of them are good with non-destructive edits. RAW Therapee & Darktable are akin to LR, so comparing them with AP doesn't really make any sense.

[1stn00b]

They are complementary software apps that you could have used before without paying a penny, since u mentioned non-destructive raw edits as a new thing.

People should check out Inskape for vector editing, works on Windows and Mac also ; >

 

 

[jaizon]

1 minute ago, 1stn00b said:

since u mentioned non-destructive raw edits as a new thing

I didn't, I said we got it in the new update. I was listing the new features because someone said that there was nothing new in V2.

Also, Inkscape is one the best free software when it comes to open source stuff. But while in the vector space of the things we have Inkscape, and for photography we have RAW Therapee and Darktable, when it comes to image manipulation and high-end edits nothing comes close to the paid options. The only real option is GIMP, but it is a poorly-put-together swiss army knife, a literal mess.

And non-destructive RAW editing in AP is just a bonus, one of those nice things to have, especially because Serif doesn't have a LR alternative, so it is worth mentioning.

[1stn00b]

How can it be a bonus if u have to pay for it ?  If it were to be added to V1 then yes : >

As for Gimp it just need more love, things should improve a lot once they release V3 with GTK3 - it's progress - not like InkScape that is now migrating to GTK4 - but should make the software more usable from a UI/UX point of view.

 

[D’T4ils]

2 hours ago, ShadeOn said:

And btw.. I don't see anywhere something about half price discount for those who own V1 and want to upgrade , only the limited time offer on time of writing this post.

To be honest, I was expecting the exact same thing. I was really surprised to see we didn’t get any kind of special deal for being long-time customers

[jaizon]

33 minutes ago, 1stn00b said:

How can it be a bonus if u have to pay for it ?  If it were to be added to V1 then yes : >

Lol, that's what you pay for, to get new stuff and for the old stuff to keep working, like in any other paid software. Now, just because you pay it doesn't mean that you'll have anything you want. You gotta understand when something good happens. nd-raw edit is one of those, you like it or not.

37 minutes ago, 1stn00b said:

Gimp it just need more love

GIMP needs to be rebuilt from scratch at some point. It has almost all the good features you'd want in it, but they are not intuitive and the interface doesn't help. I guess taking a lot of stuff out building it with usability in mind might help, like what they did with Inkscape. Just switching from GTK-X to GTK-X won't help, gotta put effort to make everything make sense, and that's where paid software usually shines.

[jaizon]

12 minutes ago, D’T4ils said:

To be honest, I was expecting the exact same thing. I was really surprised to see we didn’t get any kind of special deal for being long-time customers

Same, though 40% off + Universal Licensing is already a great deal, though I won't be buying it lol
EDIT: it seems to be even cheaper if bought from MS Store

[1stn00b]

Since we still are in the Affinity products for Linux topic i fail to get what's great about this Universal Licensing deal that doesn't work on anything i have : >

[MattyWS]

The deal is good, £90 for all of their software on all supported platforms is a steal to be fair. Linux sadly isn't one of those platforms, though I would still love for it to be. Anyways, I guess with v2 they've kinda cut off any chance of using affinity on linux for now.

Gimp needs more than some love. Gimp needs to either be build from the ground up or be taken on by a decent company like Blender has. Without a decent backing, Gimp is nothing. Progress on updates are extremely slow and the updates that are coming according to the roadmap are minimal, meanwhile Blender is blazing forward taking over the 3D industry with every update they bring. It's a real shame tbh. 

Krita is great but limited to its own thing, hand painted raster images. Inkscape is not very intuitive, especially compared to the likes of Affinity Designer, but I respect that its a good application once you learn how to use it.

In the end like 1stn00b said, darktable is a great photo editor (specifically only photo editor really). It's a shame there's nothing really like Affinity Photo or Photoshop for us on Linux that can be taken seriously. These days I really just use darktable for editing images in batches, substance designer for channel packing and photopea if I need to do any random image manipulating thats not too heavy. The Affinity Suite on linux would just be awesome. There are millions of linux users out there wanting this and even more people who don't realise they want it until it comes.

 

[1stn00b]

Comparing Gimp or any other open-source software to Blender is very unfair, since the latest has the cashflow to sustain development and also a pool of developers available from bigger companies.

But yes, like u said Gimp, InkScape are not user friendly to the "default people" that can't change preferences :>

[jaizon]

11 minutes ago, 1stn00b said:

But yes, like u said Gimp, InkScape are not user friendly

I would argue that Inkscape is pretty user-friendly, even when compared to paid software. I still find the interface, especially the panels, to be kind of off-putting, though. Maybe it is because I used it a lot, or probably because it kind of reminds me of the old CorelDRAW. But yeah, can't compare many open source software with Blender.

[j0e.org]

The V2 deal is great!

For me, I don't need an image manipulator. I need something like Affinity Designer for Linux. But InkScape is not what I like to use every day.