This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I found this video today from Michael Janda: HOT TAKE - Affinity is NOT "Free".
Although I do not agree with all the points he comes up with, he has some good explanation, while being speculative, why Affinity is going this route. In short: Affinty is now a loss leader, hoping that people will sign up eventually for a Canva subscriptipn for using AI tools in order to compete with Adobe who still is the leader in the professional field.
Not free as in freedom! 🙁
Honestly, this. This is exactly why people don't trust Canva not to enshittify it. OnlyOffice is also owned by a company, but since it's free as in freedom, people know they can trust it.
Affinity is one of the things i lost in moving from windows to Linux, but I've been getting by.
I bought a license before canva acquired it and quite enjoyed the software.
Really sad to see canva doing what everyone knew they would do to it.
If you have to sign up to use it, it isn't free.
AI training?
AI training?
When created a Canva account for Affinity 3, the setting "train AI using information about your general usage which includes fonts, colours, search queries and instructions you input. This does NOT include any of your uploaded images, videos, or designs" was on, "Allow your content to improve AI" was off.
For now it's configurable at https://www.canva.com/account/privacy-preferences and I think they'll have a hard landing on the face if they ever change it.
Probably, and also the first step towards adopting Adobe's shitty business model.
I’ve been a paying affinity customer for years, and I’m not signing up for Canva.
I get it’s “free”, but I’m sketched out.
I was really hoping for Linux support some day. Now, I am totally fine sticking with GIMP.
I was really hoping for Linux support some day.
I hope with easy access to Affinity V3, someone in the FOSS world will now reverse engineer the Affinity file format. The only 3rd party solution for Affinity files I'm aware of is Photopea but that may just as well be a version of Affinity Photo running in some VM on the server to convert the files to PSD to then edit the files from there.
Oh god, how are they financing its development? Selling my personal data? Training AI on my data? Nagware? Not giving us a Linux version, ever?
never support anything by canva
never support anything by canva
Getting Affinity without ever paying is hardly supporting them. At least it's a stopgap until Krita finally fixes their text tool which is honestly the sole reason why I bought Affinity 1 and 2. (In case anyone wonders: Yes, I also donated to Krita.)
"Free"
It's weird that I can't just login using my existing Affinity ID, also Canva's privacy policy states clear as day under section 2 that they'll use your data to train AI models, and that policy applies to Affinity.
Edit: Data collection within Affinity seems to be opt-in for now.
Lovely. \s They got brought by Canva and went down the Adobe rabbit hole.
