this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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Why not just use and support fully open source alternatives like Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive, etc instead of giving money to Adobe?
Affinity is not affiliated with Adobe. And presumably because Affinity is higher quality than it's open source alternatives.
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
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"
That happens to the commercial folks too. It is just the nature of the adoption curve.
It is the same with price. A few will say that your product is already worth 10x the price. Most will say it’s too expensive. If you drop the price, a few more will see the value. Lots won’t.
More users is more users though. It is not something to get discouraged about. The advantage with Open Source is that, as long as it is useful to some, we have almost an infinite amount of time to expand it to new audiences. Baby steps pay off for Open Source.
Yeah, why help build the next "Adobe"? Use and donate to FOSS.
Yeah man. I don't get it these days. Back when all we had was GIMP, I fully understood it. But switching to Krita has been pretty easy. The Photoshop binds are still a bit off, but nothing that you can't go in and fix up the rest of the way
By the time they get feature parity I'll be dead. Affinity is just plain better right now, and it's not Adobe.
The Affinity suite is not an Adobe product.
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.
Blender did an amazing job with their overhaul. I really don't know why anyone would use anything else for 3d modeling. I'm hoping they pump up their CAD features, but I understand if they don't.
Idk, you lost me when you said Krita's UI is too challenging... wtf
And that arrogant "I understand it, why don't you?!"-attitude is exactly what's so often the main issue in the design process of open source software.
I'd recommend watching this recent talk by Tantacrul, the design lead for MuseScore and Audacity. In it, he shows some videos of first-time user tests he conducted for Inkscape recently. It's really fascinating to see, how users fail to do what they want because of confusing UX choices. And often it isn't even that hard to fix. But open source image editors are just full of these little annoyances by now, which really smell like the result of inadequate user testing. And no professional would prefer to work all day with software full of little annoyances when there are alternatives.
I mean, just try adding text in Krita, for example. There's a giant pop-up where you have to format your text without actually seeing it on your image. That's just klunky and far more time consuming than a WYSIWYG approach would be.
@nyankas @HiddenLayer555 Unfortunately I have to agree, I find Photoshop hands down much easier and more intuitive to use than Gimp even though I've been using Gimp ever since Adobe went to a subscription only model because I absolutely refuse the Klaus Schwab notion of you will own nothing and be happy, bullshit. I was more than willing to pay for Adobe software when I could buy it but fuck if I will rent it.