51–60 of 78 posts
GIMP is still free. I made the switch from Photoshop to GIMP years ago. Never missed it for photo editing, creating logo's and other images, or designing large prints.
GIMP doesn't do 1% of what this does even if you don't have a problem with GIMP's UX. It's not comparable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a FOSS advocate, but I think that's a bit strong. I think it's more a case that they recognized the need for a good user experience, but that never hit a threshold which would move the needle for change to happen with the most popular FOSS. Darktable is probably one of the exceptions here.
I really like Darktable, and it's my go to photo editor, but the user interface really isn't intuitive on first look compared to something like Lightroom. The design choice that editing modules should be ordered by their place in the pixel pipeline is logical and sometimes useful, but it ends up with a lot of the controls being in rather weird places. The customisable quick controls palette would help, if it weren't…
An investigation of FOSS development would highlight a bunch of problems that exist to a lesser extent with other software development. When money is on the table and there is no motivation to keep supporting behaviors that particular contributors favor then feedback shift things. When you're building stuff for "yourself" then that feedback doesn't land the same even if the project owner has aspirations for better UX.
A lot of professionals would like to switch to Affinity too - InDesign hasn’t changed too much for last 10 years… But if you have everything in its format, decision to switch is tough as there is no tool to import or open full indd files to Affinity or anywhere else than Adobe. Life-time vendor-lock. For new people, Affinity is easier to start, and their new policy to give it for free is awesome. What comes first fro…
> Or attempt to acquire Canva? I wonder if the Figma acquisition being canned [0] would also prevent them going after Canva. However, there might be different people in those regulator positions/agencies... I don't want to will that into existence, so I'll just hold onto hope that fighting for regulator approval would be obscenely expensive for Adobe still. Fingers crossed! [0] https://news.adobe.com/news/news-detail…
Adobe wanted to acquire Figma for 20B, and Canva is 4.4 times bigger in revenue…
If allowed it would be a huge acquisition.
Related (which is linked to the actual post on the affinity.studio website): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45761445
I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better. This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my e…
If it’s going to be free for everyone forever, why can’t they give us a truly free binary that will work locally forever? That would give people peace of mind they can always access their data locally, the revenue doesn’t change, and the AI subscription features can still be locked behind a login.
The login and activation is a clawback option.
A lot of professionals would like to switch to Affinity too - InDesign hasn’t changed too much for last 10 years… But if you have everything in its format, decision to switch is tough as there is no tool to import or open full indd files to Affinity or anywhere else than Adobe. Life-time vendor-lock. For new people, Affinity is easier to start, and their new policy to give it for free is awesome. What comes first fro…
Canva is now north of $65B and growing at 100% YoY. Adobe's market cap is $142B, and with every month, Canva is chipping away at Adobe's value.
Can Adobe give up 40% of the company to acquire Canva, and would Canva even want that?
Mel, Cliff, and Cam continue to amaze me!
She's always been about giving the power to normies for 90% of the work, and AI is making that more accessible than ever.
Because normies, like myself, are using Canva at work, professional designers may be used for the high-end stuff or templates, but then it gets imported into Canva so the normies can do what us normies need to do with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Adobe responsive to their customers? Maybe at one point a long time ago. But this just shows the folly of tying your professional life to proprietary tool chains. Adobe's business now is to suck any blood left in their customers's veins while trying to obsolete them through AI intellectual property theft.
Adobe sucks, but I need CMYK to make “dead” print projects, so I got the Affinity suite. Open source principles are nice but unlike Affinity, GIMP was not made with graphics professionals in mind. I don’t love proprietary formats but it doesn’t matter as much for print projects which have a lifespan and revenue. People are mourning Affinity because it was a great functional tool with no strings attached. We’ve seen t…
Prior to 2025, Affinity used a
perpetual license model. In 2025,
new owner Canva (which purchased.
Serif in 2024) released a new
version of Designer that
integrates the functionality of
Photo and Publisher into a
singular application, and switched
the program to a freemium model
monetized by artificial
intelligence features exclusive to
Canva Pro subscribers.
This is analysis is spot on. I made the same argument about Figma (that what made Figma successful is that design software had started to be used more like office suite software) in my overview of the historical transitions in creative software https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions... : > In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extensio…
What made Figma successful was being able to share via a URL. Period.
No program version problems. No file extension problems. No problems between Mac and Windows. No problems with anti-virus blocking your email attachment. etc.
Figma exists because sharing a bloody file between computers is still a clusterfsck in 2025.