Re: Hello AC - Are you mainlining that Kool-Aid ?
It looks there is a lot of dogmatism among Mac "followers" as well, and consequently very arrogant way to reply.
1) Actually powerful graphic libraries for 2D and 3D image manipulations exist on every platform. For advanced graphics applications, some of the code is usually from specialized libraries, or custom one. They may be different and require porting and/or an abstraction layer, especially when data needs to be displayed on the screen, and that makes development more difficult - but it's not lack of libraries. Sure, a cross platform applications is *always* more complex.
2) It is true that for *historical* reason the Mac is the preferred platform by professional art people (Mac no longer has any edge nor in hardware nor in software). But they are also those strongly tied to Adobe for the same historical reasons, because Adobe is a de facto standard, especially if you have to rely on external services for the final output (or you have to work on someone's else input), also because most of the courses, books and tutorials you can find around are aimed at Adobe products.
Many non-professional photographers/artirsts may work on Windows for several reasons, making them maybe also an attractive target for a £40 software, especially since Adobe is trying to move everybody to its CC line, and other products like Paint Shop Pro went the wrong direction.
Of course Serif knows what its resources are, and what targets have the better ROI right now. Surely, too many Windows user don't like to pay for software, even £40, and that's a big issue, if piracy kills your revenues, there's little reason to invest the money to support a platform.
Actually that's the same reason why many don't port commercial software to Linux - as long as users are not willingly to pay (and moreover the potential user base is so small), there's really no reason to invest in that direction.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
