Fuck sake. We get a decent Adobe competitor without AI and subscriptions and it gets immediately enshittified with AI and subscriptions.
You won’t pry my non-AI Affinity 2 programs from my death grip.
Now that is not the direction I was expecting then to take this
Only in that it’s free for now. But how many features will start disappearing behind a paywall with each update, or how many ads or subtle limitations will be introduced? In the end it may effectively become a subscription, which is exactly where we all thought they would go with this.
Not sure if this is a smart move. On one hand it’s cool to not have to switch between programs for typography, photo editing and vector work and there are programs that do a lot of things reasonably well (Blender). On the other hand I think the “do one thing well” maxime is pretty a smart way to not have bloated software that tries to do everything and fails at everything which is the danger here.
Publisher was already there, and after using it I started to find the distinction between designer, photo and publisher quite pointless and weird, since each software integrates capabilities from the other ones seamlessly, in a way in which often there’s no point in choosing an app instead of the others
Affinity Studio needs to support Linux.
