regeya

There are significant differences between WSL and Wine. The first version was, iirc, an implementation of the Linux kernel API by Microsoft. Since Linux is open source, they could document the API and write their own; it worked well enough to run Ubuntu on it. WSL2 is a specialized virtual machine by Microsoft that runs a modified Linux kernel to integrate with Windows. It's great if you're a beardy Unix person or have used the command line in Mac OS to get things done. I know I've used it in Windows to perform command-line magic. Tends to work faster than Cygwin and easier than rebooting just to do some Unixy command line stuff (and don't get me started on Powershell.) Wine is a different beast entirely. It's an implementation of Windows APIs, written from scratch, merged from multiple projects over the years. Windows is mostly documented but it's that mostly part that gets a lot of devs. Further Windows has a mechanism for allowing multiple versions of the same libraries to be on the same computer, something Unixy systems tend to lack (how many times have decisions had to be made along the lines of, we can't upgrade Mac OS, this version of Creative Cloud won't run on the new system?) Add to that the fact that there's commercial forks of Wine, one being Proton, Valve Software's fork they started working on because of Microsoft saber-rattling about making S Mode the default Windows mode aka no installing software outside of Microsoft Store. So for what it is, Wine is amazing. Sometimes I'm amazed that anything works at all, let alone that I can fire up a bunch of games in Linux Steam and they just work more or less the same as they do in Windows. Ditto on apps that actually work in Wine. But it tends to be older software because the undocumented/poorly documented APIs tend to be moving targets. And of course because Wine doesn't have a mechanism for dealing with multiple versions of DLLs like Windows, you end up with projects like Lutris and Bottles, where they have mechanisms for installing multiple versions of Wine, and installing individual apps in their own directory structures. In the end I kind of don't blame Affinity for not porting. I remember Corel ported Photo-Paint to Linux using Winelib and it turns out a lot of loud Linux users don't tolerate proprietary software, especially software ported by building Linux-native apps with Windows APIs, when they're not games. It's probably possible for them to create a build, but the ROI isn't there and then they have to deal with Richard Stallman complaining that Affinity Photo isn't released under GPL3.

Here's hoping. I made the mistake of pulling the trigger on dumping almost all of Creative Cloud in favor of a Affinity Universal license, and hadn't tested because almost all the work I'd been doing in Publisher was in b&w, and after working on a color project, I'm not sure how I'm going to resolve it. In every thread, there's someone who's a print professional asking how to do a thing, and a lot of people who I'm sure are well-meaning, either question why they would ever need that, or they argue that it looks fine on the screen, or things like oh, just convert it to the b&w color profile and of course none of that is helpful. I got danged close, managing to save some old TIFFs as PNGs, recoloring them, then doing K only, but bizarrely while the individual PDF exported from v2.0.0 separates correctly, embedding it in another Publisher document–I'm using a converted InDesign, have been doing the paying job this way for years now–it seems to do some wacky CMYK->RGB->CMYK process...and not even on all the PDFs in the project. Full disclosure, I'd switched to Affinity out of financial desperation, and this has probably put me out of business. Alas, I suppose there's lots of places hiring, at least.

I just double-checked to confirm that I'm not a complete idiot; Affinity Photo 2.0.0. I managed to work around the problem by finding a G'Mic plugin feature that did what I wanted to do with a pattern.

Interesting. I landed here because I was trying to do the same thing in the Windows version; the tooltip in Windows is labeled Gradient Tool. And yes, I ended up here for the same reason.