Hi, I've made an attempt to run Affinity Designer on Linux via Wine. I managed to run the program myself, but it is not possible to create or edit a document. The problem is probably with Direct3D support in Wine or in my GPU (maybe drivers).
I will describe how to install and run the Designer via Wine. Maybe someone can successfully create or edit a document (eg with a different GPU). The operating system used is Ubuntu 18.04.
What we need?
Windows (yes, I know) - it can be a virtual machine. It will be used to extract the installation of the program because the standard installer does not work under the Wine.
Wine with some patches - we must add MoveFileTransactedA/W stubs to kernel32. The building of Wine is required.
Winetricks.
64-bit mscms.dll library.
Affinity Designer installer and license.
Offline installer of .NET Framework 4.0 and .NET Framework 4.7.2.
Step 1 – build Wine
We must build and install 64-bit and 32-bit Wine with patch. Building of Wine on Ubuntu is very well described on the WineHQ wiki: Building Biarch Wine On Ubuntu. Don't forget to apply the patch from attachment (fix.patch). During the building process I installed additional libraries like libvulkan-dev and libvkd3d.
Step 2 – create MSI installer of Designer
This step must be done on Windows. Open the command line (cmd.exe) and go to the directory where the Affinity Designer installer is located. Run the affinity-designer.exe /extract command (the file name may be different). Complete the required data and create an MSI installer. Transfer the created MSI file to your system with Wine.
Step 3 – install Winetricks
The Winetricks installation is described on the project page: Winetricks. I prefer a manual installation of latest Winetricks instead install outdated version from repo.
Step 4 – create Wine prefix and install .Net framework
Installation of .Net Framework with Winetricks doesn't work for me, that's why I do it manually.
Initialize new Wine prefix:
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer wineboot –init
Change the system to Windows XP (for correct installation of .Net Framework 4.0) and remove the mono if installed:
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer winetricks winxp
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer winetricks remove_mono
Download and install .NET Framework 4.0:
wget 'http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/5/A/95A9616B-7A37-4AF6-BC36-D6EA96C8DAAE/dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe'
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer wine ./dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe /q
Change the system to Windows 7 and switch mscoree to native (this is very important):
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer winetricks win7
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer winecfg
Download and install .NET Framework 4.7.2:
wget 'http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/D/3/DD35CC25-6E9C-484B-A746-C5BE0C923290/NDP47-KB3186497-x86-x64-AllOS-ENU.exe'
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer wine ./NDP47-KB3186497-x86-x64-AllOS-ENU.exe /q
Step 5 - run Affinity Designer
Switch system to Windows 8.1 or 10. Designer will not start in Windows 7 mode due to Aero errors.
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer winetricks win81
Install Affinity Designer (in my case MSI installer is Affinity.msi)
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer wine msiexec /passive /i ./Affinity.msi
Copy the missing mscms.dll library to Affinity Designer instalation directory. In my case it is ~/Designer/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Affinity Designer/. I have found the missing library on dlldownloader.com: mscms.dll.
Start Affinity Designer:
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer wine "C:\Program Files\Affinity\Affinity Designer\Designer.exe"
The program should start and you will see the welcome screen.
I can open preferences and change options, but creating a new document causes a crash. In Performance tab my GPU is displayed as Intel(R) HD Graphivs 4000 (I have Intel® UHD Graphics 620).
Crash report:
Attempting to create Direct3D device with adapter Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000
c:\buildagent10\work\live\persona\windows\libraries\serif.directx\dxrenderer.cpp(676): error 0x80004001 (Unknown error 0x80004001)
In the last step I tried to start the Designer using Vulkan-based D3D10/D3D11 implementation. After this (and install mesa-vulkan-drivers) in Performance tab my GPU is displayed correctly, but the program still crash while creating a new document.
WINEPREFIX=~/Designer winetricks dxvk
Crash report:
Attempting to create Direct3D device with adapter Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 (Kabylake GT2)
c:\buildagent10\work\live\persona\windows\libraries\serif.directx\dxrenderer.cpp(676): error 0x80004001 (Unknown error 0x80004001)
I know that Serif developers don't provide support for running Affinity programs via Wine. The post is for information purposes only.
