In light of this, I can't help but feel the OSS alternatives to the Adobe graphics suite are pretty abysmal.
Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
GIMP's user experience in my opinion has been terrible for decades and every time I have given it a chance it's annoyed me into closing it. I can get things done, but it gets in my way.
As for Scribus I've never used it, but based on the previous two I'm not instilled with confidence.
Hate to say it, but a subscription model is coming. Canva is making money hands over fist by doing that, and I can't imagine they are going to part from what has been so lucrative
The only reason people get Affinity is because of the non subscription model. Adobe software is just better.
I paid $lot for the entire Affinity suite and DxO Photolab instead of going with the (quite good) Adobe offerings just to avoid the insanity that is the Adobe Creative Cloud launcher. I deeply hate apps that install, auto-run and auto-update other apps. Affinity and DxO give you a DMG.
With the advent of generative AI the painting has been on the wall for some time. Using it in Photoshop is simply so good that it is a necessity by now. Affinity are not a large enough company to train an AI, and any AI will not be able to run locally for a long time. So it must take place in the cloud and therefore require a subscription.
Yes, and let me explain why. Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income. While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maxi…
It is one of many consequences of giving up software freedom.
Let’s see… they’re so far behind they only recently added pathfinder tools to their illustrator app with v2… initially claimed it wasn’t necessary https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/68819-bett... but then gave in and basically shipped it https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=... It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless…
Affinity deals with boolean operations in different way Figma/Sketch/Glyphs also dont have pathfinder. They probably added it for some edgecases and because its easier for illustrator users to switch.
Publisher has pretty much same type tools as Indesign only the panels/features are positioned differently. Publisher doesnt have multi-line composer but that is paradoxically not used in professional setting anyway (its great for quick things though).
On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability,speed,connection between the software.
It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have c…
Quark is trash but Affinity Publisher is pretty great imho if they added third party scripting/plugins pro market would start moving off Adobe.
I’m less convinced. The text features and even how frames resize images were either annoying or lacking when I last used Publisher. Yes, I used it, and yes, it worked. But it’s no contest that in the details, InDesign has more features that are (in some cases) better thought out or for text rendering, just really good. At the moment the two best ways I know of to render text are (1) any Adobe product with their text engine and (2) LaTeX via something like XeTeX, but Adobe’s still wins for ease of use. Maybe third place would go to the Safari web browser if you use the right CSS and presumably export to PDF, though using it to export PDFs isn’t as user-friendly as iOS Share panel, Chrome or Prince - for PDF export, at least. Note that these statements are subjective on my part, I’d welcome evidence to the contrary as a sign of progress away from the Adobe hegemony. ;-)
This is very sad. I’ve been an Affinity customer since V1. What I expect to happen now is in some future a move to a subscription-based model and more focus on nonsense AI features and some useless cloud integration.
Also: since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup?
I've never seen much hate for Canva until this thread. HN will really hate on any kind of acquisition, regardless of if the acquirer is a "big bad" like Adobe or not.
It’s not about hate for Canva. It’s about love for Affinity. Who are now being gobbled up by a bigger fish, with the inevitable consequence being enshittification.
This caused me to bite the bullet and buy the v2 universal licence, currently 30% off. If you've ever bought anything v1 including a single app you probably qualify for the upgrade offer which is an extra 25% off on top of the sale https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/store/upgrade-offer/
I'm not necessarily against their inevitable subscription model, but may as well get the standalone while the getting is good. There are also often some good grandfather plan rates, if I decide later to go that path.
I'm a happy Affinity Customer thanks to their low cost perpetual licenses and quality software, hoping that none of that changes - don't use it nearly enough to justify maintaining a subscription.