Affinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

I'm running Affinity Studio on my Mac. Every time I run it, Little Snitch shows that it is transferring data to many servers, such as serifservices.com, canva.com, onetrust.com, amazonaws.com, sentry.io, ..

I've tried to set privacy preferences to maximum, but it hasn't helped. Am I the product? The old Affinity Designer 1 doesn't send any data to servers, so I'm still using it instead of the new app.

Not only this, but it's like Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign all mixed up into one super-app. This beats Adobe's cross-app functionality by miles.

Affinity would be a great clone of PS, they copied it up to 90%. But for the last 10%, they were like, you know what? Let's do it in a way that it will make no sense to someone who has used PS for decades. I remember if you wanted to have a transparent background for your file, you had to CREATE the file SPECIFICALLY to have a transparent background. In PS, you just deleted the default white background, and bumm, you had a transparent background. I'm pretty sure PS behaved like this since - at least - PS 4 (not CS4). That last 10% has these idiocracies.

It actually used to be paid. I paid for Affinity Designer when it came out first, then Affinity Photo. I didn’t pay for the publishing software since I was too deep into TeX. But at that time they promised that they would never become subscription software like Adobe and that message was part of the reason I bought it. I liked and still like perpetual licenses.

I paid for the entire Affinity suite in one shot, was worried when Canva took over, but glad to say everything's working together just fine.

Did they ever get the renderer on par with Photoshop? Every png I rendered with Affinity looked like shit but this was years ago.

Free (as in beer). There's always a catch.

Though, it's success does make me wonder if a GIMP based editor with a similar interface would work well

> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

How is this sustainable for a for-profit entity? How do they pay the bills/developers?

> It's also entirely free with no gotchas.

Not true since it requires you to sign in with Canva account.