Bring the Affinity Suite to Linux - #AffinityOnLinux
If a program insists on Windows, it is instantly deemed incompatible with my operating parameters and fails my system requirements…
The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.
A subscription web service
If we all spent that money on gimp, scribus and inkscape, they would be so much better in just 2 years.
GIMP had almost 25 years to be acceptable. It is still awful to use. Serif’s Affinity was awesome within half a decade.
Must be something with free software that just sucks.
The something that sucks is lack of money. Paying developers to do work definitely helps. It’s unfair to level unconstructive critique at the end result when it hasn’t ever had the same opportunity to thrive that the paid software you’re comparing it to had.
Serif produced a nice software suite by paying developers. They got that money from investors who made it by exploiting people (like every corporation) and then exploited their workers and customers in turn. While this resulted in a relatively nicer alternative to Adobe shit, it still isn’t ideal.
Imagine if GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, and Krita all had the kind of financial support that corporations do. Blender and the community supporting them are figuring it out to some extent, and now Blender has essentially either matched or eclipsed the corporate competition. This is absolutely possible for other FOSS software, but we the community need to be there for them financially too.
GIMP etc are not developed by the target consumers is the real problem. affinity exists literally to capitalize on adobe going subscription and their entire effort has been to basically make adobe-but-better at a reasonable end user cost to convert users. As a professional designer, I have successfully migrated to Affinity after years of waiting for GIMP and others to match adobe offering. Even now, I would still use Photopea over GIMP. If one guy can make Photopea in his spare time, then what is stopping the GIMP team from doing the same while being paid? I’ll tell you; because they have no idea what a professional actually needs.
If there was a Publisher (InDesign) and Designer (Illustrator) equivalent just like Photopea - my life would be infinitely better because I’ve long since given up hope on Inkscape etc. I could finally breathe as i leave Windows forever. Sadly, best the world is willing to give me is fucking canva, and now those assholes own Affinity - so in the end, i’m still stuck between a rock and a hard place/
Paying developers to do work definitely helps.
The lead developer of GIMP currently receives about €1,200 per month in donations via PayPal, and the entire GIMP project receives even more via LiberaPay. Admittedly, this is not really ‘their paid job’.
But now I’ve had to listen to open source fans for over twenty years saying that open source software shows that you don’t need a lot of money, just a lot of volunteers to do much better work together. I don’t doubt that (for example) Blender is excellent software, donations or not (they didn’t always exist). But why does this concept fail when it comes to image editing software?
Yeah it’s definitely not just a money thing. Some projects and communities like Gimp have been historically dismissive of design as a concept. Where as Blender has not despite starting in a bad place design wise. It’s come so far.
Gimp needs a philosophy change more than anything but it will never happen with half the community screaming “it’s just different” anytime someone has valid criticisms. Design literacy is as real as code literacy. Thankfully there seems to be lots of other graphic projects these days that might fill the void.
Which one could replace GIMP? I might be curious. I saw a few development projects, but I don’t know their current state.
Agree.
Oh no, when did they get bought by those ghouls?
Awh fuck. I bought a lifetime thing for the whole Affinity studio like two years ago when it was on sale. Is there a decent alternative to Affinity? I would rather not go back to GIMP for images, just cos the UI/UX isn’t so smooth!
One of their pledges when they were bought was to always have a standalone product to buy so people don’t have to do subscriptions.
That’s good of them. We’ll see what their Canva overlords think of those nice intentions 🫡
The current version of Affinity is great and will continue to work forever—there’s no need to switch to an alternative if you’re already using it. I just don’t have much hope for its future development.
Its moot because Affinity have already said they will not, not ever.
I’ve always been surprised affinity isn’t on linux I would think people looking for alternatives to adobe would also be looking for alternatives to windows so it makes sense to put them together.
There is a wine branch that can run Affinity just search for it
Question, are you running it? I got really hopeful about it but feedback I read said it wasn’t very good. It worked, technically, but was buggy making it less than ideal. I forget all the details but it was enough to make me not want to even try it.