I also remember blender was considered a hobbyist tool and in last couple of years it has been used more and more for hardcore professional stuff (note that I’m not in the field to know the specifics, might be for much longer).
yeah that’s what I meant. it was updated at a snail’s pace up until 2.8, and then the dam broke. it’s been getting updated so fast now it’s hard to keep up honestly. somehow it doesn’t feel as bloated as Adobe AI or PS.
Must be really exciting for people who have been using it for a longer time! And I have heard that adobe products have gotten really slow. Thankfully I don’t need them.
affinity’s apps blow them out of the water in terms of performance. and unlike Adobe’s suite they actually work well with each other. meanwhile adobe products call the same filter different things on each app, pen tool works differently on each app, etc.
affinity suite is not FOSS but they only sell you major versions (1.0, 2.0) once and you get all updates until the next major version for free. obviously you don’t even need to buy new major versions (although 2.x is so much better than 1.x) and can keep using your version without paying anything forever. so 1000x better than Adobe’s extortion subscription plans.
I’ve heard people praise and was excited adobe has a competitor. I know I’m not the target group for such apps but it still makes me sad that they don’t support linux.
I know someone who really wants to switch fully to linux and stop dualbooting, but they can’t due to professional software in their fields not being supported on linux :( hope this changes or that our beloved FOSS apps gain similar momentum as Blender.
to be fair serif (affinity’s company) is tiny compared to Adobe. so they have had pretty limited resources and it makes sense they targeted Windows and Apple systems, which is where nearly 100% of designers are.
but they got bought by canva, so that could be good or bad. they put out a pledge to not enshittify affinity but a company’s word has no worth we’ll wait and see. but maybe there’s a remote chance they might look into Linux support in the future now that they have more money behind them.
still a very risky move for a business. it makes much more sense for FOSS apps to do that but design apps are a huge undertaking.
gimp just released a major update and I downloaded it, jesus christ it still is unusable for an actual designer, and looks fugly to boot. this is not up to hate on gimp but these projects just usually don’t have actual designers working on them so there’s only so much coders can do.
I think there’s a barrier to entry. we should think about an ecosystem where designers can contribute to such projects without the need to understand how software works. anytime someone mentions git my eyes glaze over.
Yeah I fully understand that a small team can’t support linux if most of the customers are on mac/windows.
I agree with everything you wrote - the same person I mentioned earlier is not a coder but would love to contribute in design (already does with language), but finds it very difficult.
The ecosystem could be similar to the translation tools for FOSS that are quite nice!
I also remember blender was considered a hobbyist tool and in last couple of years it has been used more and more for hardcore professional stuff (note that I’m not in the field to know the specifics, might be for much longer).
Here’s to hoping FreeCAD reaches similar status!
yeah that’s what I meant. it was updated at a snail’s pace up until 2.8, and then the dam broke. it’s been getting updated so fast now it’s hard to keep up honestly. somehow it doesn’t feel as bloated as Adobe AI or PS.
Must be really exciting for people who have been using it for a longer time! And I have heard that adobe products have gotten really slow. Thankfully I don’t need them.
affinity’s apps blow them out of the water in terms of performance. and unlike Adobe’s suite they actually work well with each other. meanwhile adobe products call the same filter different things on each app, pen tool works differently on each app, etc.
affinity suite is not FOSS but they only sell you major versions (1.0, 2.0) once and you get all updates until the next major version for free. obviously you don’t even need to buy new major versions (although 2.x is so much better than 1.x) and can keep using your version without paying anything forever. so 1000x better than Adobe’s
extortionsubscription plans.I’ve heard people praise and was excited adobe has a competitor. I know I’m not the target group for such apps but it still makes me sad that they don’t support linux.
I know someone who really wants to switch fully to linux and stop dualbooting, but they can’t due to professional software in their fields not being supported on linux :( hope this changes or that our beloved FOSS apps gain similar momentum as Blender.
to be fair serif (affinity’s company) is tiny compared to Adobe. so they have had pretty limited resources and it makes sense they targeted Windows and Apple systems, which is where nearly 100% of designers are.
but they got bought by canva, so that could be good or bad. they put out a pledge to not enshittify affinity but a company’s word has no worth we’ll wait and see. but maybe there’s a remote chance they might look into Linux support in the future now that they have more money behind them.
still a very risky move for a business. it makes much more sense for FOSS apps to do that but design apps are a huge undertaking.
gimp just released a major update and I downloaded it, jesus christ it still is unusable for an actual designer, and looks fugly to boot. this is not up to hate on gimp but these projects just usually don’t have actual designers working on them so there’s only so much coders can do.
I think there’s a barrier to entry. we should think about an ecosystem where designers can contribute to such projects without the need to understand how software works. anytime someone mentions git my eyes glaze over.
Yeah I fully understand that a small team can’t support linux if most of the customers are on mac/windows.
I agree with everything you wrote - the same person I mentioned earlier is not a coder but would love to contribute in design (already does with language), but finds it very difficult.
The ecosystem could be similar to the translation tools for FOSS that are quite nice!