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Comment by theobr | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Affinity's suite exclusively for about 4 years now and I haven't looked back once. Briefly tried Photoshop again for the generative AI stuff and it was slow, unreliable and crashed multiple times.

HIGHLY recommend giving Affinity a shot, I've edited thousands of images with Photo and I can't imagine using anything else now.

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I agree they are great software, and I own an old Affinity Design license, but unfortunately not long after I decided to ditch Photoshop, I also decided I needed to ditch windows.

At the time there was no Linux support which made me sad. I have no idea if that has changed.

I am in same place. I keep Mac laptop for graphics because of this.

I know the win version now works pretty well on linux with wine. But the process to set this up is not yet automated (like 20min) and is being worked on. So i was too lazy to properly try it.

> I know the win version now works pretty well on linux with wine. But the process to set this up is not yet automated (like 20min) and is being worked on

Where did you get the information about it being worked on?

Neither does Adobe

Can’t emulate it?

> I've been using Affinity's suite exclusively for about 4 years now and I haven't looked back once.

Unluckily, Affinity Designer still has no tool for tracing images (a functionality that would be really helpful for the tasks that I use Affinity Designer for). :-(

UPDATE: Also halftone effects for fillings require quite some hacks in Affinity Designer.

It also has no curvature tool, which is a huge deal breaker for many vector artists. I have been making a stink about this online across many platforms for years but the team has shown no intention to adopt it.

I just use Inkscape for tracing and then export to SVG. I can't use Inkscape for anything else but it does provide that function.

A free option for tracing is:

https://www.visioncortex.org/vtracer/

Lack of scripting automation and a blend tool are my only real disappointments with the product. These aren't enough to make me switch back to Adobe mind you, but they're relatively glaring omissions I think.

Seconded, there are many ways in which Designer and Publisher are actually superior as well (beyond actually feeling respected as a customer).

Agreed people talk about features Affinity dont have but there are also many things that Adobe doesnt have or does so much worse.

Hige part of Adobe dominance (with pros especially) is the inertia to switch because of the workflows baked into muscle memory. Often the wierd quirks and inconsistencies became the standard. And adobe has many because all three softwares were developed by different companies.

I did not know about Affinity. I just signed up and was downloading files in less than a minute. In two minutes I was sitting in front of Photo 2, ready to work.

I just wish the Affinity apps weren’t so slow. Ever action lags and waits for the app to catch up, not to mention how long it takes for the app to start up.

Does Affinity suite include generative AI at all?

Not that I'm aware of. I hope that their new relationship with Canva gives them the resources to add AI for some features. that might be a 3.0 version.

It has content-aware fill, which IIRC is an early form of gen-AI.

I confirm, best soft ever!

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