Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

That has been my experience recently. I had the same mindset as you until a critical piece of software I use shat the bed on Arch (LiveCaptions) that affected my being able to watch training videos for work.

Because it was time critical and I didn’t feel like possibly breaking other things for one package, I grabbed the flatpak. It came with its own nvidia driver package (mine was newer) and it worked out of the box without having to mess with anything and that was enough to change my hardline view on that.

Now it’s just another tool to use in an emergency when important things randomly break.

That’s fair, thanks for expanding on the criteria! Serif is indeed still located in the UK, I had a look before commenting. The address of the company headquarters matters, for sure.

for example publicly traded companies are usually owned by several investors and might even be hold in majority by foreign investors - but the company itself has to follow regional laws which is what we focus on.

Absolutely. Ubisoft is a great example of that. Last time I checked, Tencent owns a bunch of shares there - not enough for a majority, yet it’s still a concern for the future.

The site is bookmarked and I’m looking forward to watching it develop!

Canva (an Australian company) bought Serif not long ago, so Affinity Photo is technically Australian software now. Might want to update that list ^^