Inkscape Developer Reacts to Affinity being Aquired

This spare of the moment video is brought to you by "things I needed to say"
It's not great news to know there are millions of users out there who don't get to own their work tools. But I hope through developing Inkscape and your help funding my work, we are making a difference and allowing users to free themselves from this sort of depressing news.
Now what can we do to make things better?
If you'd like to help fund my work, please consider joining my Patreon: / doctormo

[@CTRL_SMarcos]

Since this is not the first time Adobe buys a product and immediately kills it, here is a "conspiracy theory" Canva buys Affinity, Adobe buys Canva and kills two competitors to make way for Adobe Express and Illustrator. Sorry, I'm just bored...but on the other hand, who knows? 🤔😆

[@gregdarroch1946]

I purchased the entire Affinity suite, despite almost exclusively using Photo. I moved to Affinity from Adobe because of the subscription model, and was happy to support Affinity because it wasn’t subscription. I feel quite a sense of betrayal at the moment. The language used in the announcement from Affinity didn’t give me confidence at all. The old “no current plan” for change really means “we will wait a short time before we introduce the new model”.

[@HaraldEngels]

Inkscape has some quirks but I am not willing to use something different than open source software (OSS). I am very grateful for all these people who make OSS possible.

[@kjmav10135]

I work in nonprofit, and as for software aquisitions, we have been through the mill. I have seen better, smaller software companies eaten by the big kahuna and then killed. Result? Less choice, worse functionality, more expensive subscriptions. Thank you, Ronald Reagan for weakening antitrust laws and for making Mergers and Acquisitions a major feature of Reaganomics. In my opinion, a major reason for our current out-of-control price surges in just about every area of life.

[@toxiccan175]

Instead of paying a subscription for temporary access to Adobe under the guise of funding continued development, it would be better to have a recurring donation to Inkscape to actually fund development. With the latter, you still have access after you stop paying.

[@anth5189]

The problem is that no believes these people anymore. They say Affinity won't change, but companies constantly lie. So they are going to have a very hard time getting anyone to trust them. Of course these companies bring it on themselves.

[@michaelcopple1736]

What sucks for Adobe users, (I am unfortunately forced into that column right now), is at this time, when you try to terminate your monthly sub, you are penalized an additional sum of money for something you do not own. WHY? That is cronie capitalism. Open source is a far better option and the popular projects are getting much more polish. Inkscape is a fabulous and well thought out program, Martin.

[@chrisnash584]

Affinity designer user here. I don't know how helpful this is, but it was always my impression that not having an image trace tool in the Affinity suite was a huge miss on their part. I know inkscape and illustrator both have one (and to be honest i haven't used inkscape in a couple of years) but just making sure that some tools that already exist within the inkscape environment continue to get tweaked and updated to keep up with the industry standard would go a long way. Thanks for all the great work you do :)

[@bodamat]

The big disappointment with Inkscape is it's so slow on Mac machines with Apple Silicon. It has sometimes even slideshow to just move a canvas :( Unfortunately, this is my main machine where I worked. In this regard, I was also choosing Affinity instead of Adobe because of one-time payment, but also good working on Mac.

[@Volt-Eye.]

Thank God I use Inkscape 🎉🎉🎉

[@Inkscape-tutorial-pl]

There are a few things Inkscape needs to become more competitive:

[@kameikojirou]

I moved from Adobe to Affinity to Inkscape about two years ago. CMYK is the only reason I still use Affinity software from a Virtual Machine. Inkscape is an absolute Joy to use otherwise.

[@human_named_Melissa]

Only been using (learning) Affinity Designer for a short period for SVG files for my laser. I just downloaded Inkscape and will learn that now. So Thank You for being here for us all!

[@nzlemming]

Martin, you never blather. I'm very pleased to have found your channel. Inkscape user for nearly 20 years and very happy with it.

[@TimJones105]

I would love to see some sort of “Pixel Persona”, introduced into Inkscape. Being able to “paint” with actual raster brushes, would open huge opportunities for open source artists, allowing them to stay within Inkscape for vector and raster mixed media work flows. 👍

[@paintdrops]

The way you place text on pathes and ellipses and then move the text along the path/ellipse (using the bottom green/red things) is much more easier in Affinity Designer. Dark mode makes Affinity user interface look more professional: Grey Inkscape looks like a 90s software.

[@TravisBerthelot]

Inkscape is great software. Keep up the good work.

[@toolsman4820]

Just finished my latest work with both Affinity Designer and Inkscape. Mainly use Affinity Photo but after the acquisition and watching your video I found that I need to pay more attention to FOSS creation softwares like Inkscape and Krita. Thanks for your contributions and contents Martin!

[@OnyxStudiosInteractive]

I really like your image to svg tracing feature. As far as what you could do to appeal to Affinity users, I think you could add some visual hierarchy to the UX/UI to make it more like Affinity. Their icons are slightly larger and more differentiated. Also depending on the area, some tool icons and controls are visually larger such as the persona and color tools at the top.