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Please support this! As graphic designers we should be able to use a open source OS.
(www.change.org)
I'm almost sure it works with wine
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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It requires a custom version of wine
Why?
Because for it to run it needs a patched version of wine with dxcore support(or smth like this)
Ok, makes sense
Why not just use and support fully open source alternatives like Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive, etc instead of giving money to Adobe?
Affinity is not affiliated with Adobe. And presumably because Affinity is higher quality than it's open source alternatives.
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
it's just that software isn't there yet.
I put about 2000 hours of work into $open_source_project. After a huge release 10xing the quality, we had about 1000x as many users.
The existing user base was ecstatic- for many of them, it was all they ever wanted and more. But we had 1000x new people saying "it just isn't there yet"
Yes, because everyone has different needs. Even blender, which has gone far and beyond most graphical software, would be a no-go for someone because of one or two specifics.
Again, I firmly believe in OSS, but I don't see how porting more professional software hurts the community or freedom effort, when our biggest hurdle is adoption. Missing things people need is a barriers of entry. Missing things a workplace needs is an automatic loss.
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This isn’t Adobe.
And as much as I want to like Krita, GIMP and such, their workflows just can’t compare with proprietary software in many cases. Also, especially for photo editing, their feature sets can’t compare with Adobe’s or Affinity’s either.
I use Krita, GIMP and Affinity Photo pretty regularly, and while there have been great improvements to the open source alternatives recently, I just get stuff done with Affinity, while still having to constantly search the web for things Krita and GIMP hide somewhere deep within their menus.
All open source image editors I’ve used are in dire need of a complete UX rework (like Blender and Musescore successfully did) before being more than niche alternatives to proprietary software.
So, as of yet, I can definitely understand the wish for a feature-rich and easily usable image editing suite on Linux.
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.
What’s crazy is that while I used to know countless Maya / 3DSMax people, everyone seems to have switched to Blender. It’s crazy how fast the industry switched to Blender after that UI revamp.
The UI was pretty bad before, it took forever to get people to understand what was going on. Now it's just a few tips and tricks and people are off and running. They did a great job.
@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.
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The Affinity suite is not an Adobe product.
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Actually, I never witnessed change-org ever changed something.
Well it makes people feel like they've done something.
Exactly. If the effort is low the result likely will be as well.
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FYI, Affinity was bought by Canva, ~~this is probably an advertising.~~ Affinity will probably enshitify in the next release. Hopefully not, but who knows.
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That is a waste of time. I emailed the company a few months ago and they replied that they won't port to Linux. Not that they don't have plans to currently do it, but that they won't. Clear as day.
Indeed, I don't get the post. Does OP genuinely think they could influence Affinity to support linux? Via freaking change.org?? Really, why is the post so well-received by community? Got so many questions.
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is there anything more useless than signing online petitions?
Yea yea. I'd love it, but it would still be a proprietary product you'd be tied into as a customer. I'd rather support Graphite when I can https://graphite.rs/ as well as Krita and Inkscape.
I don't mind paying for good software on Linux. I don't understand this idea that everything Linux should be free.
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.
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If you wan't to use FOSS I get it, I want to. But when it comes to professionnal workflow you sometimes have to put your ego on the side. When I tried to ditch the Adobe Suite, the Free(dom) alternatives didn't worked for me or the proprietary alternatives were simply better.
Inkscape is great but Affinity Designer is superior in many regards and even it is inferior to Adobe Illustrator. GIMP and Krita are awesome tools, honestly GIMP3 makes me want to play more with it and Krita is an awesome digital painting software, one of the best out there. But for photo editing Affinity Photo is still better for my workflow even if I still prefer to use Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.
The new redesign of Scribus in unstable is exciting but I don't see myself using it for professionnal work. Affinity Publisher is just better and yes again Adobe InDesign is still superior.
I've almost fully ditched Adobe (with the exception of Photoshop), I often try Free and Open Source alternatives and while some are good enough none can compare to Adobe who is leading the industry by the way, that's the sad truth as of today.
Here is a list of alternative to Adobe I've made : https://alternativeto.net/lists/25812/softwares-for-content-creators-that-don-t-want-to-supports-adobe-monopole-/
Edit : grammar and typos
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If you don't start using and contributing to free tooling now, they'll never get better and they'll never be "professional" (whatever that actually means).
You can continue to lock yourself into proprietary tooling, but that result will always be the same: a decent product gets bought, made subscription, get worse in quality while bleeding the customer out via subscription. You are already there will Adobe, and its started for Affinity.
So, the longer you hold out on FOSS tooling, the worse and slower things will be.
Look at how excellent FOSS tools are when they get attention and investment: blender and krita.
I work in CGI and I use Photoshop for about 4 hours a day preparing images for clients, of whom use Photoshop and affinity (cheaper and one off payment). in the office, we are at our whits end with windows bugs and its just general annoyances.
we use Linux for rendering, so we've seen the light. but we are forced into using windows for the creative suites. I would love it if affinity were to offer native Linux support, the entire office would love the switch. however I'm very doubtful it will happen.
This is such a looooong shot, a more realistic plan would be to play the Powerball to win and use your winnings to fund open source programs into matching feature set.
Which is also wildly unlikely, but just a little more likely to happen.
I mean… you know they sold out to Aussie-Adobe like 4 years ago right?
They are currently strip-mining the code so they can learn how to write an application that isn’t an instagram filter tacked onto MS paint… I just made that last part up, hopefully they do something good… but I assume they acquired Serif for the sake of IP protection and not because they were hoping to develop it further. I haven’t seen anything innovative happen for the last few years at least.
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It's owned by Canva, so I'd be willing to bet their next release will we some kind of web version - in that case there would be no need to port it.
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I've just tired installing the trial of Affinity on Linux by using a script for Lutris, and I've failed.
The day when Serif releases an Affinity suite for Linux I'm going to buy it asap.
In the meantime, I'll stick to Gimp and Inkscape...
This ain't it, Chief.
I would, but I can't get through their captcha (even w/ adblockers, tracking, etc all disabled)
I mean, signing a change.org petition has resulted in absolutely nothing, ever, so it's not like your vote is exactly vital here
You can already use gimp and inkscape.
Also darktable, rawtherapee, DigiKam and Krita. Not sure if those are suited to professional work, but for amateurs they are more than enough.
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