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”
Yes, because everyone has different needs. Even blender, which has gone far and beyond most graphical software, would be a no-go for someone because of one or two specifics.
Again, I firmly believe in OSS, but I don’t see how porting more professional software hurts the community or freedom effort, when our biggest hurdle is adoption. Missing things people need is a barriers of entry. Missing things a workplace needs is an automatic loss.
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.
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.
Just want to chime in that a Krita developer has been working on a complete text tool overhaul from the ground up for the past 5 years or so, and it is just about ready to be pushed into the beta versions, so that pain point should be resolved soon, thankfully.
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”
Yes, because everyone has different needs. Even blender, which has gone far and beyond most graphical software, would be a no-go for someone because of one or two specifics.
Again, I firmly believe in OSS, but I don’t see how porting more professional software hurts the community or freedom effort, when our biggest hurdle is adoption. Missing things people need is a barriers of entry. Missing things a workplace needs is an automatic loss.
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That makes absolutely no sense
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Windows is fucking miserable and Affinity is not.
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.
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.
Just want to chime in that a Krita developer has been working on a complete text tool overhaul from the ground up for the past 5 years or so, and it is just about ready to be pushed into the beta versions, so that pain point should be resolved soon, thankfully.
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The Affinity suite is not an Adobe product.