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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Oh boy. I willingly gave my money to Affinity because I don’t want a subscription model, I don’t want my creative apps to rely on the cloud _at all_ to work _and_ I want native Mac apps. I am not reassured by their FAQ at all.

I suspect a year from now Canva will break at least one (if not all three) of these features and force me to leave Affinity by version 3.

It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense (well, I am happy to keep supporting Pixelmator, but… you get the idea).

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In addition to Gimp there are:

- Paint.net

- Pixen

- Inkscape --- straight-forward vector editing

- Seashore --- this is Mac OS UI overlay for GIMP

- Krita --- vector editing with painting features

- Scribus --- page layout

- TeX/LaTeX --- batch/markup driven page layout which can do anything one can put together a TeX macro to achieve (I use it a lot and have written articles for TUGboat on it: https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

- Blender -- 3D modeling

- GraviT --- another vector editor, this is likely the one most like to Affinity Designer (since they were both modeled on Freehand)

- FontForge

I wish more people knew-of/promoted Krita - it's far more user friendly than GIMP and just as powerful if not more.

Fantastic for photo editing, digital art/paint and vector tools.

https://krita.org/en/features/

Krita is a close second to Blender in terms of well-run creative FOSS projects. Would love to see more projects take their approach.

I thought they were different tools. GIMP == Photoshop, Krita == Illustrator.

Krita defaults to a "Paint Layer" behaving very like Photoshop; it can also add "Vector Layers" that behave like Illustrator. I think it is fair to say it replaces both for a lot of use cases. GIMP is much closer to just Photoshop (and say Inkscape is much more only Illustrator).

Interesting! I'll have to check it out.

There is also Graphite (https://graphite.rs/) which, unlike Gimp, has a modern architecture and very ambitious goals (Blender for 2D basically).

Features: Written in Rust.

Not really a feature.

Also it has very little implemented right now. Kind of disappointing when I clicked through hoping to find a gimp alternative.

Looks awesome!

Photopea as well (photoshop clone in browser)

That’s not a real alternative for a high-res workflow.

I used most of those (I paid my way through college with Photoshop 2.0 and Macromedia stuff). There is really nothing in the Open Source world that is good enough. Maybe Krita, but not for Illustrator-grade vector editing. I really miss Macromedia...

> It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense

I know successful agencies relying on OSS tools only (such as Gimp and Penpot) so I wouldn't mind that. I hope Gimp will have its Blender moment (I've been using Blender for years, but always kept coming back to Maya, this changed with the new UI)

Agreed, GIMP is powerful and just one UI refresh away from being a true alternative for many.

I already started to worry about Affinity's strategy when they introduced online activation in version 2 of their software. I really appreciated the offline activation in the original versions - it means I will forever own Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher 1 on my NAS, no matter what they decide to do in the future.

Affinity already disappointed the original believers when they started off telling people they could pay a one-time fee and get all future updates for free. They then ditched version 1.xx buyers by releasing a version 2 that you could only use if you paid them again.

Affinity should not have said that (if they did), and no one should have believed them. That's just not how software or business works. Even if we go back in time to packaged software, big updates were always a pay for upgrade.

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