Renzatic

Cuz Linux.

That's assuming what you're looking for is either in your package manager, or there's a handy .flatpakref/.rpm to download. God forbid someone's mean enough to send you a program in a tar.gz file. Basically speaking, I just tell people that flatpaks are in /.var/app, and everything else is in /.local/share in your home folder. If you have raw app files without an installer, just pop them in one of those folders, and if want it to integrate with your desktop so that you can discover it through a search, or pin it's icon to the taskbar, you have to write a .desktop file, and drop it in /.local/share/application. Having to do this is getting more and more rare by the day, but there are still occasions where you have to do it. ...wish someone told me this years ago.

Though it had improved by a considerable amount, Linux was a lot more fiddly back in the mid '10's compared to now. These days, I'd say that it's no more difficult to use than Windows, once you get used to the differences in how you install and manage apps.

Maybe about 2010. I'd say it's only been in the last 6 years or so that Linux became actually easy to use.

It has adjustment layers. That alone puts it well above GIMP.

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.