Libre Art & Design
Everything opensource and libre regarding visual art and design!
Did you try Affinity Photo/Designer?
Affinity is pretty good, but is currently enshittifying after being acquired by Canva.
Also it's not easily installable on Linux which is unfortunate.
Right! I saw a couple people bringing it onto Linux. So far they have all said it’s working and performing well.
The enshittifying I haven’t witnessed yet.
Yea, once it is on a system, it runs pretty well from what I saw. There are just a lot of steps to get it to emulate, you can't just simply run it through wine.
Canva is notorious for eventually turning everything they touch into subscription services. They altered the licensing agreement and this is why there is now Affinity, and Affinity V2 applications i believe. From what I understand Affinity apps should be safe with their lifetime licensing, but they wont develop it further. V2 I am fairly certain they can turn that into a subscription service legally due to the license changes, and it will be the one they continue development on.
Oh I thought V2 came out before the buy. This is too bad. I will be switching to Linux before the Oct 2025 deadline and hoped I would have at least somewhat functional design, photo editing and publishing suite. GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus can’t seem to get interfaces in check. Conformity, iconography and layout need to be aligned throughout all apps. I know different people developing but still to win over users their needs to be something to bridge the ideas. I’m just ranting at this point.
I understand where you are coming from as far as the other applications are concerned.
In my case if I need affinity, I have it installed to a windows VM I set up with KVM/QEMU.
I might go through the configs needed to get it running locally at some point, but I just don't have the time right now.