Please support this! As graphic designers we should be able to use a open source OS.

It's not just about quality, there's a lot missing or honestly plain worse in gimp for example, compared to affinity photo. I'm as big a proponent of OSS as any, it's just that software isn't there yet.

What's more, the target audience for that product are usually people who've had their chance encounter with programming and have decided against doing it. My anecdotal experience obviously. Edit: I mean it's unlikely they will contribute to features

Blender did an amazing job with their overhaul. I really don't know why anyone would use anything else for 3d modeling. I'm hoping they pump up their CAD features, but I understand if they don't.

@nyankas @HiddenLayer555 Unfortunately I have to agree, I find Photoshop hands down much easier and more intuitive to use than Gimp even though I've been using Gimp ever since Adobe went to a subscription only model because I absolutely refuse the Klaus Schwab notion of you will own nothing and be happy, bullshit. I was more than willing to pay for Adobe software when I could buy it but fuck if I will rent it.

Idk, you lost me when you said Krita's UI is too challenging... wtf

Exactly. If the effort is low the result likely will be as well.

Which is worse than useless since it renovated the impetus to do anything else.

It's like when you tell everyone your new years resolution and they all go "wow you're really courageous, well done on turning the new leaf". Your brain goes "ok, got my recompense for that, no need to put more effort in there" and bye bye resolution.

Yep, and then everyone will go start looking for another option again. I hope they don't, but those CEOs got get their more millions paychecks so they can stand up straight at the country club, somehow.

When the acquisition happened they made a pledge to keep affinity as a separate product and to have perpetual licenses.

Technically they can always introduced a subscription in addition to perpetual licenses but the implication is that they wouldn't do that.

For what it's worth, they understand their user base and were vocal about their plans. Maybe they'll disappoint, but they haven't really given reason to doubt so far.

No problem. they are great currently.

Understandable.

Advertising for a change needs great effort. I'd rather spend the effort in improving gimp, writing down whats missing and how to get there. Adding suppor for affinity won't improve gimp, does it?

This is a Linux community not a professional art/design community.

Do you mean 200?

Yeah, I'm sure they'll hire a division dedicated to Linux development, with all the costs that brings, just because of that.

Got 'em#

It's not that paying for things is bad. The problem is that good software is vital to digital artists' income, and both purchasing and learning that software is a substantial investment. When a company sells or otherwise enshittifies their software, the artist is then put in a very hard place. Open-source software is the only way to combat that unfortunately likely scenario. By all means, please pay for that software if you can afford to. Doing so subsidizes usage for less fortunate people who may be able to better their situation as a direct result of your generosity.

I have paid (by donating to them) for many of the open source software I use, so I don't think that everything should be free (as beer) but should be free (as freedom) and therefore open source.

That's not what people demand, it's a side effect of users demanding software be open source and developers saying that's not economically viable.

I don't mind paying for software either. I own Affinity & Zbrush licenses. However I run the risk that in the future, these products may be sold to the highest bidder and development stalls (as it happened a couple years ago in the case of Zbrush) or interoperability suffers. When this happens, not only is your database of scenes and files obsolete, you also have to go through the process of learning a different program, and DCCs are... huge. Whole factories. It's very hard to reinvest the time necessary to learn them inside out and be proficient again. It is also impossible to contribute to a non-open codebase. Proprietary programs are ticking bombs.

Agreed it's very capable today

Nice. Hopefully that matures a bit more but yes the technologies are exciting

I agree with you, but there's two sides of the coin.

I would rather pay for a finished product that is good. Sure I can download Linux for free, but I'd rather pay for it. I'd rather support teams that are putting out a product to ensure it is the best it can be and be continually maintained.

FOSS doesn't have to be free. Nor should it be.

However when projects get organized like that they become organizations. Organizations become businesses. And that's fine. Let's support them so they can eat and feed their kids.

So it begs the question, if I feel that way about them is it fine to support non open source orgs and software? Of course it is.

So it basically comes down to the complaining that the software is not good enough.

Of course "good enough" isn't binary, so if its on the threshold of usability I use it and if its severely lacking then I don't. No big deal.

If its free, then there is no reason to complain regardless. If you're paying for it, I think your opinion has a bit more weight. Of course there's still a scale. If it's so far removed from usability then I just don't buy it. Windows is a good example of that. But if its close, voicing your opinion that you want certain features is more than fine. It doesn't remove your support. Wanting Affinity on Linux is a fine desire. If they haven't said they aren't going to then asking isn't a complaint. It's a want.

I use Affinity because its the best solution I can find. I would love to have it on Linux. Maybe one day it will happen, but I'm not holding my breath. Supporting Affinity in hopes that they make it better for me (for my preferred platform) is OK, because I'm finding a way to use the product that suits me today. If that way becomes too much hassle tomorrow, I'll move on. But if they make it easy for me to stay with them then I won't. But either way, supporting Gimp won't make it Affinity. It'll just make Gimp a better Gimp.

I guess it boils down to, do you support something that isn't what you want in hopes it becomes what you want it to be or do you support something that is exactly what you want, hoping it will go to where you want it?

Sorry I rambled on there (I'm tired). I do agree with you but there's a counter point I also agree with. I don't think they are exclusive.

I agree with you. My dream is that every public school should use and contribute to FOSS and FOSH, but I'm an utopiste. Honestly I wish Serif would at least free some of its codebase but that's very unlikely. I would like to have these proprietary software as I still rely on them for my workflow on a GNU/Linux machine rather than macOS and that sounds more reasonnable for a private company building private code and selling licences. Today it's some of the few software that I can't run on GNU/Linux to ditch a proprietary OS for work.

I have finally ditched Windows years ago after living my whole childhood in that proprietary crappy spyware environment and did tried many FOSS tools for professionnal work and I do use some (PenPot, blender, OBS, Thunderbird, VSCodium (and Zed a bit), LibreOffice, Nextcloud, UltimakerCura and Signal to name a few).

Unfortunately I still do rely on proprietary software (and these rely on proprietary OS) and yeah there is a reason for that : I need to get the work done. They have the money proprietary licence advantage over FOSS tools of course but hey a small part of the money I make thanks to these proprietary tools are sent to foss projects I want to support. It's not as big as I wish and I don't have enough time nor skills to contribute as much as I want to the Free World in general but I do my part and it has grown over the years.

I would prefer relying on proprietary solution on a free OS than relying on proprietary software that rely on proprietary OS. That's why I signed this (probably useless) petition.

Agreed. At the cost of Adobe software, it is amazing that we cannot get a Kickstarter to fund software that closes the gap.

$250 one time from 4000 people would be a million dollars. Isn’t it $300 a year for Photoshop?

Yes that would be awesome, probably 1% would still be big.

I have been donating to FOSS project that I rely on (or sometimes project I find important) using free and open source payment method like Bitcoin (even sometime using the Lightning Network) or Monero for two years now. I wish more people that could afford it would do the same. Obviously I don't donate as much as if I was paying for the full Adobe Creative Suite (which was included in my scholar fees) but I donated a few hundreds USD in total to various projects since 2023 and I won't stop until I am cut from my income.

As long as you’re doing it in a VM might as well try the MacOS version. IIRC the OS screen scaling and apples requirements that everything have vector or MIB mapped icons makes for a much nicer experience.

I don’t know if it works on a VM… just fondly remember using the apps on my MacBook 😅

Doesn't matter cause I bought the lifetime license. Sure, maybe it won't get updated any more, but the current state is pretty much sufficient.

The problem is that if widespread desktop Linux adoption is the goal, then the tools for amateurs aren’t going to cut it. Not even close. Tools that professionals use need to be available and they need to work like they do on macOS and Windows, it’s pretty much that simple. I think Darktable is fine for me tinkering around with my amateur photos. If I were a professional using it daily I’d probably hate it.

As much as we wish it wasn’t true, most people don’t really give a shit about their OS. It’s the logo that appears when they boot up their computers to work. What they do care about is having their tools available to them, if they can’t use the Adobe Suite, Pro Tools etc (and no, WINE is not a practical solution for most of these people) then Linux of any flavour is functionally useless to them. It’s for this reason that smug people saying “just switch to linux lol” as if it’s an actual solution whenever a Windows user complains about some rabidly anti-consumer bullshit that Microsoft is forcing onto them annoys the hell out of me.

It’s changing somewhat now, but it’s why you’ll find that a lot of people in the creative industries traditionally stick with macOS, because for a long time the options for those professionals were just better on that platform and people tend to stick with what they know.

On the other side of that coin, you have software vendors looking at the single-digit market share that Linux on the desktop “enjoys” and coming to the fairly reasonable conclusion that building packages, fixing bugs and providing support for myriad different distros just isn’t worth the headaches it will inevitably cause for them.

Classic chicken and egg problem.

GIMP is honestly fantastic. My workflow goes draw in GIMP, import to Inkscape to convert pieces to vector, then bring them into Godot where shaders get applied. I would rather draw in GIMP than any other program. I find drawing in Inkscape super awkward in comparison. GIMP is pretty no-frills, but it does the job. I prefer it over Photoshop. With Darktsble I've found it useful for importing high res raw images for textures too.

I don't know why people hate on it so much. It's all about using the tools you're comfortable with.

My strongly held suspicion is that it's a form of the dunning-kruger effect. People have a lot of experience using software-A so much so that they tend to overlook just how much skill and knowledge they have accumulated with that specific software. Then when they try software-B they misconstrue their lack of knowledge with that specific software as complexity.

You just answered yourself. They're just tools.

Can I ask your perspective on the comments here saying that Krita and Inkscape just aren’t comparable to their commercial alternatives?

I am a professional and have been doing this since... Well, I started with Mac OS 7, let's put it that way. Krita and Inkscape are like using craft scissors to cut sheetmetal. They're simply the wrong tool for the job. They are maybe 10% comparable to Adobe apps. Affinity apps are probably 60% or 70% comparable. Anybody who says Inkscape is a replacement for Illustrator simply does not use it in any serious professional capacity. It doesn't even have any means of adding paragraph spacing!

I've written a few articles in LibreOffice and the things I need to be able to do just can't be done in order to follow the structure of the zine I was writing for. It's a hobby zine and the work is free by everyone so they just reformatted it for me; but it still inconveniences others when things aren't within a certain expected standard. I do blame microsoft for it though; all office apps uses the same standard except microsoft, unfortunately all the users uses microsoft office...

and no, krita, inkscape, gimp, etc. can't replace Affinity. Affinity itself could barely replace Adobe in their first place. but it still has, for many. so it's not a learning issue. Affinity is more intuitive than Adobe, so in this case Adobe is just outdated.

but as for the open source, the issue is more than just a lack of features. The UI is at least 15 years out of date.

Professionally the software just isn't there; and it's a real shame too, because I feel very uncomfortable using ANY microsoft products (on principle). But as far as Photoshop goes, there is photopea which is a great free browser based clone. Sadly there is no illustrator or indesign browser based clones that can match the quality of photopea, and the only desktop apps up for the job of matching Adobe is currently the Affinity Suite.

Why?