this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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Help support. Please make Affinity possible on Linux!

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[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 50 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] amateurcrastinator@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I don't mind paying for good software on Linux. I don't understand this idea that everything Linux should be free.

[–] zqps@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] stray@pawb.social 11 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 8 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] scheep@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

honestly inkscape is great :D I switched from illustrator after my adobe creative cloud subscription expired, and it's been an easy transition!

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago

Agreed it's very capable today

[–] orgrinrt@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh wow, hadn’t heard of graphite/graphene yet, and it looks so interesting! I rarely explicitly thank a comment that gave me a lot personally, but this time I think I have to. The graphene framework and the concept of artwork as compiled programs is pretty intriguing read! Thanks a bunch!

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

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

[–] Tiger_Man_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm almost sure it works with wine

[–] Mwa@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It requires a custom version of wine

[–] Tiger_Man_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] Mwa@lemm.ee 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Because for it to run it needs a patched version of wine with dxcore support(or smth like this)

[–] Tiger_Man_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 8 hours ago

Ok, makes sense

[–] roawn@feddit.uk 27 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 38 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] snroh@lemm.ee 54 points 2 days ago (1 children)

is there anything more useless than signing online petitions?

[–] quack@lemmy.zip 94 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Complaining about online petitions.

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[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 166 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (7 children)

Why not just use and support fully open source alternatives like Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive, etc instead of giving money to Adobe?

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 125 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Affinity is not affiliated with Adobe. And presumably because Affinity is higher quality than it's open source alternatives.

[–] piratekaiser@lemm.ee 58 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 38 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

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"

[–] piratekaiser@lemm.ee 21 points 2 days ago

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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[–] randomblock1@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

By the time they get feature parity I'll be dead. Affinity is just plain better right now, and it's not Adobe.

[–] nyankas@lemmy.ml 46 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (10 children)

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.

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[–] EmilyIsTrans@lemmy.blahaj.zone 36 points 3 days ago

The Affinity suite is not an Adobe product.

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[–] muhyb@programming.dev 116 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Actually, I never witnessed change-org ever changed something.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 44 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Well it makes people feel like they've done something.

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[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 37 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (9 children)

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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[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 19 points 2 days ago

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...

[–] enemenemu@lemm.ee 83 points 3 days ago (6 children)

I'd rather support FOSS software

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[–] jagged_circle 14 points 2 days ago (4 children)

You can already use gimp and inkscape.

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 19 points 2 days ago (9 children)

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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[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 80 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

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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[–] eugenia@lemmy.ml 64 points 3 days ago (4 children)

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.

[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

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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