The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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If we all spent that money on gimp, scribus and inkscape, they would be so much better in just 2 years.
I am actually producing PDF/X-4 print-ready stuff with Inkscape, ghostscript and Scribus. I even have TrimBoxes and proper CMYK.
But it involves many manual steps, especially overprinting for the K color channel does not work and I need to adjust every polygon and vectorized text manually.
I whish it would be possible all in one tool. I can afford the time, because it is only a hobby. If it would be professional the extra steps involved make it not good enough.
The thing preventing me from using Gimp is the terrible UI and UX. And that situation hasn't really changed very much in the last 15 years, either. I'm getting the feeling that Gimp is stuck as it is because the devs and current users want it like that.
I don't do much editing (certainly not fancy stuff with heavy use of all the tools), but there is a pretty good mod/patch PhotoGIMP that makes it present similar to Photoshop. It isn't that old GIMP-shop one that might have malware. Doesn't fix the missing stuff that power-users need, so no go for many of them. But the UI is much better than the main version of GIMP. Just have to apply the mod/patch after installing GIMP.
PhotoGIMP is the same jank, just taped together in different locations instead. It's very slightly better, but the actual tools and how you use them are the same. The problem seems to be that Gimp (and all the tools in it) is designed by developers.
Good to know that you actually give options a try (every now and then I try Photoshop to see how it works and new things). So many people will just hate on things just because they just hear that they are bad. One of my friends does photography and hates how Photoshop being a subscription costs so much. But refuses to bother checking-in on GIMP or other options. Even Lightroom alts are deemed not worth it just from muscle memory it seems. Which I do at least understand, but even just checking on options can mean having fall-backs if suddenly needing them. I doubt Adobe will just go away, but they can always make costs higher and higher which price people out.
It would be good if more UI/UX minded folks that actually use Photoshop/Lightroom but hate Adobe's sub models were to help out. Even just giving good input and follow-up with why or how those things could work is a starting point. Devs and creatives need each other for making projects/products like GIMP into options that more people would use for real.
Have you tried 3.0? Genuine question because I haven't and the UI looked a lot better than earlier versions. But if it's still janky...
I haven't actually used 3.0 yet, but from all the screenshots I've seen, it looks basically the same.
Anyone who has, I have a question: Can you draw simple primitive shapes non-destructively yet (without having to open another plugin panel, select something in a very long dropdown, and filling in a bunch of parameter fields)?
PhotoGimp is the same jank, just taped together in different locations instead. The problem seems to be that Gimp (and all the tools in it) is designed by developers.
GIMP had almost 25 years to be acceptable. It is still awful to use. Serif’s Affinity was awesome within half a decade.
Must be something with free software that just sucks.
The something that sucks is lack of money. Paying developers to do work definitely helps. It's unfair to level unconstructive critique at the end result when it hasn't ever had the same opportunity to thrive that the paid software you're comparing it to had.
Serif produced a nice software suite by paying developers. They got that money from investors who made it by exploiting people (like every corporation) and then exploited their workers and customers in turn. While this resulted in a relatively nicer alternative to Adobe shit, it still isn't ideal.
Imagine if GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, and Krita all had the kind of financial support that corporations do. Blender and the community supporting them are figuring it out to some extent, and now Blender has essentially either matched or eclipsed the corporate competition. This is absolutely possible for other FOSS software, but we the community need to be there for them financially too.
Paying developers to do work definitely helps.
The lead developer of GIMP currently receives about €1,200 per month in donations via PayPal, and the entire GIMP project receives even more via LiberaPay. Admittedly, this is not really ‘their paid job’.
But now I've had to listen to open source fans for over twenty years saying that open source software shows that you don't need a lot of money, just a lot of volunteers to do much better work together. I don't doubt that (for example) Blender is excellent software, donations or not (they didn't always exist). But why does this concept fail when it comes to image editing software?
Agree.
Oh no, when did they get bought by those ghouls?
Awh fuck. I bought a lifetime thing for the whole Affinity studio like two years ago when it was on sale. Is there a decent alternative to Affinity? I would rather not go back to GIMP for images, just cos the UI/UX isn't so smooth!
The current version of Affinity is great and will continue to work forever—there’s no need to switch to an alternative if you’re already using it. I just don’t have much hope for its future development.
Its moot because Affinity have already said they will not, not ever.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/98932-faq-affinity-on-linux/
They didn't say they never will. They don't have plans for it, but they won't rule it out.
We won't rule out making a Linux version of Affinity in the future if the right Linux distro comes along with a reliable deployment platform that will allow us to recoup our development cost for the Linux version.
I guess they could use Flatpaks here if they don't want to deal with packaging it for every distro.
I've also seen Serif saying that they won't. It was someone else that linked it. I have tried to find the link again but could not and I'm too tired and sick to keep looking. The TL;DR was that they tend to be good at stringing people along but they've definitively said its not on their roadmap, won't be added and supporting Affinity on Linux would be too expensive/difficult.
Canva has little financial reason to invest in Linux users either.
Enshittification also adds to making it incredibly unlikely.
People have been begging Adobe to port to Linux or at least make their products work with WINE for more than a decade now to no avail and Adobe, unlike Serif, has the budget to do so.
But surely this petition with nearly 400 signatures will convince them there's a business case for supporting Linux!
I've always been surprised affinity isn't on linux I would think people looking for alternatives to adobe would also be looking for alternatives to windows so it makes sense to put them together.
There is a wine branch that can run Affinity just search for it
I tried multiple times but i ended up loading it in a vbox 🤷♂️ since the Canva acquisition I started getting used with gimp, krita and inkscape. I have zero hopes for this.
what is it?
Adobe alternative
It's a professional-grade graphic design software.