My comments are based on my observations. I don’t have much experience with apps and development.
I don’t think that there is such a thing as an all-in-one piece of software even in the commercial world. This is a generalization of course. However, if you look at any software company, chances are that you would have a litany of offerings.
Say, for example, Adobe. Look how many apps it has in total (I bet most of us don’t know most of them, except for the popular ones)! No app does it all. Very likely, you would need at least Photoshop and Lightroom to do the job. Same with Illustrator and InDesign. I find that I would need both, not one or the other. Making features missing in one app and available in another partly has to do with getting the customer to spend more money (before Adobe turned to the subscription model). It also has to do with keeping software development and quality control manageable.
Oh, the subscription model. The app world is moving in that direction. Something to do with job security… Lots of other industries do that and are quite successful, although the poorer customers are worse off due to having to pay the constant upkeep, along with their normal bills. It does have its benefits, like addressing the problem of having to cripple software to entice more purchases. Adobe customers don’t have to deal with that any more, though there are subscription tiers.
This model of course was a big turn-off for many customers who proceeded to migrate to other software ecosystems. I think that is why Affinity means something to many people. In certain respects, FLOSS software, even though they have their own issues, are not hostage to the issues that I described above.
Gimp and Inkscape fulfill my needs, but I’d most certainly buy a license for any Affinity product if it was available on Linux.
The thing is, I only use FOSS software but I purchase the proprietary equivalents on Linux too because you never know when you might need them.
Also, I like to use proprietary software from time to time to get familiar with the new features and practices. That way I make informed feature requests or bug reports to their FOSS alternatives. It’s a good practice I’d say, especially for that price.
I support FOSS projects via donations, just to make clear that I don’t leave out foss projects out of my monetary contributions because of the proprietary software.
What I don’t ever use is pirated software, that is a serious security risk.
I would easily pay $250 for Photo and another $250 for Designer. I publish graphic novels and comics, so CMYK is a must for me, and the Affinity products give me great (albeit not 100% but damn close) compatibility with Adobe file formats, but without having to purchase an expensive subscription - also, if I need to view files on the go or do minor edits, I can use their great iPad apps.
I know the alternative is to use Win10/Mac, but I find owning more than 1 mac cost prohibitive, and Windows 10 has become to slow, insecure, and distracting - popups for updates, system issues etc… sometimes I just want to get work done, and for me Ubuntu is perfect for this.
One thing that AP can definitely do better is focus stacking. Panorama is different. I recently did a comparison between Hugin, AP and Ps with a huge panorama composed of 28 shots - AP was the winner, although its results are worse when it comes to smaller panoramas. Hugin could not build the panorama in original size. http://betazoid.bplaced.net/lilac/2019/04/riesenpanorama/
AP is also very good at large color spaces.
But there are also functions that AP “copied” form e.g. darktable.
Well, one could maybe say that AP is the leading photo app these days… I personally only use it for focus stacking, i.e. hardly ever. But I kind of like to have it. Sometimes I do the same task with several programs and then compare the result.
I think the developers of AP are watching the open source apps like a hawk because that’s where the new ideas come from.
I see I am the last person who commented this thread. Nevertheless I want to try to revive it.
Apparently Affinity Photo is becoming more and more interesting for “pros”, e.g. advertising agencies. MS Office for Linux is already partly available (btw: it is an interesting coincidence that Teams for Linux was released days before the Corona crisis). MS might swallow Ubuntu…
This poll shows clearly that there is interest in Affinity Photo for Linux
Although I would clearly prefer some long awaited important new features in GIMP, but are those coming ever?
Might this depend on MS and Canonical?
I’m actually working on adding guided selection on Krita to make it closer to Photoshop/Affinity. And then, I might work either on adding LCH Blending Mode and/or filters to make it better. I have added several blending modes, symmetric difference selection mode, and gaussian high pass filter.
I currently print with Affinity Photo in a Windows 10 virtual machine from Linux. Because printer drivers for photo printing on my Epson XP-8500 are still miles ahead on Windows compared to Linux.
Now if only there was a VM software that was faster than a snail with broken legs on a 4K screen…
Well, of course it’s just speculation so far but… it looks like MS is abandoning Windows because it’s not profitable enough. They still can make money with Office though. Office for Linux (both deb and rpm) is definitely coming. Windows will still be around for some years. Well, time flies…
They’re abandoning Windows 7. To be honest, at this point, for many Windows 10 seem to be staying and among the gaming community, they already have made games compatible for W10 and more.
M$ made it clear that they were changing their business model with the mass giveaway of Windows 10 to holders of copies of prior Windows releases. It was no longer about selling licenses for the OS. At least part of the game is now monetizing the information they gather about people’s activities. Millions upon millions of users will never bother to review and change the invasive default settings. The data slurping must be audible in M$'s data centers.
While this is probably what they want to do, it is not really compatible with the european GDPR. And thankfully the GDPR seems to be a kind of blueprint for dataprotection advocates even in other parts of the world. Sure, they will not abide to this as long as they can…but at some point, specifically if they want government contracts for more security affine tasks…windows just has to stop sending data to the headquarters.
So, yes, Win10 is suuuper intrusive with it’s data gathering, but there are chances that this will have to change at some point. I would love for linux to gain more traction in the consumer world.
It has been quite some time since I’ve had a linux running on a machine at home. I just spent 30 seconds looking at Dell’s web site and I suspect that until linux is offered as an installed OS on the machines people are buying for themselves or their kids, linux isn’t going to crack mainstream consumers.
Just think about it: If there is MS Office for Linux, there will me many more Linux users. If there are more Linux users, there will me more libre graphics users.
Just think about it: If there is MS Office for Linux, there will me many more Linux users.
Where did you get this information (about MS Office developed for Linux)?
I have read this “news” for ages but it has never been proven true so far…
In all truth, I can not understand why Microsoft might be ever interested in porting its Office suite to Linux where the user-base is estimated around 1-2%…
Just think at the nigthmare to make it working on systems quite different as Gnome and KDE and you get an idea to the problems to face…
On the Serif’s Forum the developers have explained they are not willing to port Affinitity to Linux for this exact reason: there is not enough revenue in return
Thanks for your link!
Never used Microsoft teams so far…
From what I have gathered from your link it looks like a Cloud application not a native desktop software…
In all truth, this confirm my assumption that there is no real seriuos Microsoft’s attempt to work on a native Office suite available for Linux. From the economical return it does not make much sense in my opinion…
Right now you can already work with Office on Linux, through Wine…
Never tried personally because in my view it does not make much sense to work with Office on Linux
At present, you have already LibreOffice, which I use at work, where we have dropped Office, in hundreds of PCs…
In my opinion Office will never be ported “natively” to Linux BUT I would be really happy to be proven wrong
In the past 20 years (no joking!) I have always read that the next year will be the one where Linux will make its way on Desktops but so far the percentage of users has always been stuck to 1-2%…
Even Canonical has reduced its sponsoring to its developers wokirng on Ubuntu for the Desktop platform, (Unity desktop I mean) since it was not giving much economical return.
I have had a strong feeling with the trends of Microsoft over recent years that Linux is the direction they are heading. I do not think they will buy up Ubuntu but I do think at some point Windows will migrate over to a Linux Kernel and it is still possible for all the games to still work assuming they port over DirectX and make some sort of Driver compatibility layer.
Well, on Windows/Mac, a professional graphic designer has with Affinity Photo, Scribus and Inkscape a really good alternative to Adobe CC. It’s a pity this does not exist for Linux yet.
