Renzatic

Man. I was downloading Photo for a quick experiment, and I saw that I bought it in 2016. That was 6 years ago! It made me feel old.

That's how it started out way back in the day, but now it's primarily about playing World of Warcraft on Linux. The proof's kind of in the pudding here, in that most games run nigh natively through WINE or Proton (which is basically WINE with Valve money behind it) these days, but running a desktop app is still a turkey shoot.

If I had to take an uneducated stab at a guess, I'd say poor Direct2D implementation in WINE is the major culprit behind the flickering canvas. As far as I know, Direct2D doesn't see much use in games, being used primarily in desktop applications, which means that it's most likely to be ignored by the WINE devs.

There were some incidents. Feelings were hurt. People cried. It was terrible. Though on a high note, a new Gnome extension came out that rounds window corners, so Photo now looks more like a native app. Though it still crashes all the time, and the canvas still flickers a bunch, so it's most one giant tease at the moment. But still... Rounded window corners!

I made a 3000x3000 image, and upsized an oil brush to around 2000px. It looks like it's painting at about the same speed as it would in Windows, but the canvas goes so screwy that it's nigh unusable.

Well, yeah. No one uses the Nouveau drivers unless they're either hardcore FOSS fans, or are really desperate.

Just to test things out, I installed Photo using 1stnoob's custom recipe above, but using Bottle's brand new Soda 7.0-2 runner. It works better than it has previously. I can now reliably open the preferences panel without crashing, and can even drag and drop images into the editor from Files like a native application. That said, the canvas is still a little flaky, and enabling the rulers on the UI, or hitting up a more process intensive live filters like lighting can cause it to crash. Right now, I'd consider it, maybe, 60% usable. So close, but not quite there yet.

It did the same thing to me. I could see my GPU listed in the tab, and it reported that what it saw as Windows 10 was up to snuff for the task, but it still wouldn't allow me to turn on hardware rendering. Right now, WARP is the only option.

Nvidia GPUs don't really have any problem in Linux, besides flaky Wayland compatibility, and having to go a little above and beyond to install the drivers for them. I don't think I've used the Hide Nvidia GPU proton flag once in my entire life.

The only way I've managed to get past that is to create a bottle tailored to applications. It installs Mono automatically, which seems to fix the .Net 3.5 issue. Of course, that limits you to only using Caffe 7.5. When I try creating a custom bottle with another runner, it always fails to grab its own version of Mono. Installing it from the dependencies does nothing. Installing dotnet35 fails to complete, and, well, it seems my options are limited. Changing the runner manually in the yml file doesn't seem to do much of anything at all. Shame this isn't a big game everyone wants to play. We'd have a fully running version by now if it were.

Out of curiosity, what changes have you made to my base configuration? I still can't access the Preferences panel. Also, switching to a Wayland session does lead to a slightly less flicker filled experience.

If you really want the best example for how that'd turn out, look to the Google v Oracle lawsuit that popped up in the courts here a few years back. The way Android translates Java calls isn't entirely dissimilar to how WINE works with Windows APIs.

Most EULAs are filled to bursting with stipulations that sound scary on paper, but are unenforceable from a legal standpoint. Did you all read the license agreement when you installed your Affinity apps? Do you REALLY think Serif has total ownership of our immortal souls?

Think this could be because you're using Wayland? Since I've got an Nvidia card, I tend to stick to X more often than not.

Here you go. Just let me add that it's far from perfect. For some odd reason, I can't access the preferences from the instance that can open a canvas, but if I lead the Run Executable command directly to the .exe in the Program Files folder, it can open the preferences, but crashes when it open a new file. Also, when you make your brush size overly large, it gets very, very flaky. backup_Affinity-Photo.yml

That helped out tremendously. The canvas is buggy, flickering when you drag, pan, and zoom, and occasionally it'll stop drawing portions of your image (which you can get back with a quick pan), but it's actually functional. I opened up an old image, threw a couple of quick adjustment layers on it, then opened a new canvas, dragged the tab over a slot, then ran a paintbrush over it. Didn't notice any lag or hiccups beyond the canvas issues. So you CAN edit in it, even if the experience is sorta janky at the moment. Edit: Here's a quick little video showing off some real basic functionality.

This is the closest I've yet managed to get. I can open the application, and screw around with all the various bits and bobs in the UI, but when I try to open a document, it crashes on me. This is the farther I can go. Edit: Okay, further experiments. I managed to get it to open both a new document, and an old, fairly complicated Photo file I had lying around. The good news is that it works, and it looks like it works well. That old complicated Photo file I opened up has a fair amount of adjustment layers stacked on top of groups of layers each with their own adjustement layers within. It looked like it was handling things like a champ. The bad news is that the UI is a flaky, flickering mess that's nearly impossible to use. So we're 3/4ths of the way there. Underneath it all, there's a working program. We just need to wait until a fix comes by that stabilizes the UI.

There is Krita, which is a helluva lot better than GIMP, though I still wouldn't quite consider it a 1:1 match for Affinity or PS.

WINE Is Not an Emulator! It's even says so in the name! Though WINE is fairly performant compared to their Windows counterpart. You usually get native, or 99% native performance out of applications running through it. On rare occasions, you actually get better performance.

I bet at least 10.

No, there's a good reason. The developers actually spent a good amount of time improving Blender, and keep to a regular release schedule, always offering features people want, and are comparable to the competition. GIMP? Well, GIMP doesn't really do that. Their devs are planning on some nice new features, but we probably won't see them for another 4 to 6 years.

Unless things have changed recently, Gnome Boxes doesn't let you passthrough a GPU. I wouldn't use Photo or Designer in a VM that lacks that option.

Because it's cheaper to let everyone else do their work for them. It's already worked wonders for AMD.

It's possible that the unexplored potentialities of the GPL might scare away a few developers, though generally speaking, it's not much of a concern. Proprietary software isn't exactly rare on Linux, open sourced software and APIs are common on proprietary platforms, and lawsuits are pretty few and far between. If we go by history, the only time the Software Freedom Conservancy goes after someone is when they directly alter GPLed code for their own use, and release it commercially without offering up said altered code for free download on request.

Commercial software on Linux doesn't risk running afoul of the GPL. So long as no one take any open sourced code licensed under such to use in their software, the two can pretty much exist side by side.