Laying out the 404 Media zine
8 comments
·December 12, 2025Duanemclemore
Great read. They also talked through the podcast and made specific reference to Ernie and his use of Affinity through Lutris on the recent episode of their podcast. [0] It was a good listen.
edited to add: I am however surprised that Ernie didn't just go for VivaDesigner [1], as it does seem to be a more drop-in InDesign replacement and is Linux native...
[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0TG6fsy7cLEkOEj8SIm8ci?si=4...
lionkor
Lutris is so fantastic, if anyone here is on Linux and needs wine, try Lutris. It puts each app in its own wine prefix, its just nice to use.
aquariusDue
I don't know why but I could never get it to work properly and had more success with the Bottles flatpak instead. I should really check out a tutorial for Lutris because people are always praising it and I feel it's more of a me problem that I can't get it to work.
burnto
Enjoyed this a lot. I, too, spent many years involved in print layout. In my case it was a lot of QuarkXPress. My friend aptly described it as a “very cross program” but it was quite efficient once I learned it.
-0_0-
Very interesting read. Always love learning how new media tackles old media processes, I'll be interested to see how the zine fares long term.
I actually built my own InDesign clone just before wrapping up with my last employer (inspired by Photopea) given how fed up I was with InDesign and its quirks.
It was a pretty neat little product - ingested all our website stories and automatically laid them out into a newspaper, which could be further edited in the browser or output as print ready PDFs that would go straight to the printers' FTP server.
I'm willing to bet there's a huge market out there that's itching to jump ship from InDesign as soon as Affinity proves its worth. Adobe has squandered their moat. I've already worked with companies that now do all their desktop publishing in Canva - still get an eye twitch from that, but it worked and staff preferred that mess over InDesign.
p0w3n3d
Scribus is available on Linux but the interface is Spartan. Maybe also you could put your fingers on Greenstreet Publisher which used to be freeware 20 years ago, but if you get old windows in virtualBox, TBH nothing has changed. I mean what? Fonts maybe would need conversion to TTF?
null
Indesign was such a satisfying way to layout documents. I just cannot reproduce the same feeling using affinity products. Shortcuts feels wrong, defaults feels wrong, etc.
I wish Adobe stayed the 2004 company version of Adobe. They were good.