Inkscape and GIMP etc are fine tools in their own right (I have had them installed for years) but where things have always broken down is when you’re working in larger teams and working towards a larger goal.

Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, LibreOffice is an awful chain when you compare it to say Affinity where you can shift between vector, pixel, and layout workflows within the same tool (or copy and paste seamlessly across Adobe tools).

Until the FOSS community sits down and works with creatives and end users who don’t use the tools (which Audacity did thanks to Tantacrul and the results speak for themselves), we’ll be stuck with proprietary tools.

The problem is when new users turn up to give feedback to say Inkscape for some of their weirdness like opening a blank doc each time the app opens, different tabs for fill and stroke color, weird behavior with fonts changing when you backspace out to an empty box, blah blah, the community goes “skill issue” or “this isn’t Adobe”.

Yet they fail to understand the design decisions as to why other products have more obvious behaviour patterns - they want the tool to be relatively self explanatory and try and align to user expectations as much as possible.

Tantacrul did a great talk at FOSS Backstage Design conference that is really worth watching if you’re interested in the topic.

In this thread:

• users rejoicing
• users who never donated a cent to krita or gimp shitting on it

As usual, the entitlement amongst users stays high.

A major reason these kinds of things are happening is the EU move toward digital sovereignty.

Since there isn't exactly a non-US commercial OS available and Linux is good enough for most everything, we're starting to see a lot of interest in the open source world and moving towards open and standards-based software.

Commercial companies recognize that the EU governments represent a huge potential source of income. Some categories of software have essentially no Linux support... this leaves a huge vacuum to be filled by a company who can create professional image editing/CAD software which also works on Linux.

If Affinity is the only large, commercially supported professional publishing software available then they become the defacto winner of all of these new EU Digital Sovereignty contracts.

Do it if only to see Adobe suddenly figure out how Linux works

More options is always good (they can miss me with that gen AI trash though)

I wonder how easy it is to use compared to GIMP or Krita?

(I still suck with Krita but that's a me thing lol)

As a Linux desktop user for almost two decades, can you explain to me how this Affinity thing I have never heard of, can "transform desktop Linux"?

The ever "art" app that sends every single of your creation to feed their AI? Thanks, no.

We already have apps, we don't need AI powered slop to come into our space.

Would be huge!

Yessssss!! I can hopefully get my work to ditch Adobe!!

Got affinity designer v2 installed on Linux works ok with small files. Affinity (v3) works if i don't place more than one rectangle.

Native Linux would be really appreciated

Finally a good (Proprietary) alternative to GIMP.
Would be Cool if it also supported ARM64.

The final reason I still boot to windows, publishing apps.

Oh, wow

Oh, this will be a hell of a game changer!!

Honestly, it seems kind of moot if it already works in the browser. It's a negligible amount of work to make an app use a browser engine to run offline to run their stack, but some heavy lifting to do a direct port to any specific OS without an adjoining framework to help in the cosmetics of everything.

That being said, they could also use a unified framework to do one release for every OS, which again is pretty much the same as making offline work for anywhere.

My fear is they do something stupid like build in GTK, and then QT users have UI problems, or vice versa. Seems easier to just go with a unified (non-electron) kit that runs everywhere the same way.

Doubtful