D’T4ils

Well i would pay again for a native version - off course if it's available as a Flatpak package so it includes every dependency - practically eliminating the usual problems u get when not everybody is running same distro or have same libraries - and it also simplify their development and bug fixing 😆

^ Now that should be absolutely crystal clear for everyone to understand that we are not going to get a Linux version so there is no point anyone again asking for it to happen.
That said, Serif Europe staff, in particular Mark Ingram, have been very helpful with their comments and constructive suggestions in trying to get Affinity Photo to work under Wine and thank you very much for that for it is greatly appreciated.

Oh wow... not touching that. There's clearly some dark history here or on the forums that I don't know about. Past discussions must have really been not good.

Apologies for the enthusiasm and for getting involved. I thought we were here to celebrate and show support, but this thread must be long for other reasons. No more posts from me.

Thanks a bunch to 1stn00b and whoever else lead to this ending up on the Wines page with something functional. Thanks to anyone not here who helped from the Serif side. I'll be eagerly awaiting what the Wines contributors can do from the sidelines and looking forward to more updates there.

The first thing I must do is thank you very much for all the work, effort and feedback that you have put in to make Affinity Photo work on Linux via Wine, etc.
I very much like your suggestion that the Affinity products could be bundled up with all the specific Wine fine-tuned elements in one of the container formats when all the bugs are sorted out. There is already a precedent for this.The free Windows-only photo editor Photoscape 3.7 software is bundled with Wine as a Snap. It works so well that you cannot tell that this is not native Linux software.
I would like to see the same thing happen with the three Affinity software products starting with the 30 day trial version of Affinity Photo. However, it ought to be pointed out that this might require the permission of, or at least tolerance of the situation by, Serif Europe. The trial version of commercial VueScan scanner software is currently available as a Flatpak so again there is a successful precedent there and no doubt Vuescan gets additional sales that way so it's a win-win situation for everyone.
I would welcome the comments from Serif Europe staff about the issues raised in the paragraph directly above.

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!

well the brush lag isnt great, it flickers, but the pen pressure actually works without fussing around which makes it better than Adobe Photoshop(TM) Creative Cloud on Microsoft Windows(R)
I honor your efforts with this shitpost, please enjoy.

Thanks a lot for putting so much effort on trying to help me out, mate
After trying different things, I finally got it to work! The issue was with the Nvidia drivers I was running on. The X.Org Nouveau ones were causing the issue. Once I switched to the proprietary ones Designer as well as Photo started working, both on Intel Integrated Graphics as well as on my Nvidia GTX 1060. I experienced the sames glitches that everyone’s mentioned so far, but at least both apps are running now
Btw, my Nvidia card is also being recognized by Affinity’s apps:

Thanks a lot for putting so much effort on trying to help me out, mate
After trying different things, I finally got it to work! The issue was with the Nvidia drivers I was running on. The X.Org Nouveau ones were causing the issue. Once I switched to the proprietary ones Designer as well as Photo started working, both on Intel Integrated Graphics as well as on my Nvidia GTX 1060. I experienced the sames glitches that everyone’s mentioned so far, but at least both apps are running now
Btw, my Nvidia card is also being recognized by Affinity’s apps:

You can always switch to X11 from login screen and see if it makes a difference.
Are u running latest version of Bottles ? Just do a flatpak update in terminal to be sure.
 
L.E. And off course i forgot the most important thing you can launch with Terminal from menu and check  the  errors you get
 

@1stn00b first of all, thank you very much for taking the time to create that little guide
And now to the good stuff, I follow every step and the installation ran smoothly, but once I hit the play button for the installed Affinity Photo, nothing happened at all Which version of the installer did you use? 1.10.5 didn’t do it for me.

Actually i think this is a bug in Bottles for now - but they have a 2 week release cycles between versions.
In order to make it work for now create a custom bottle and import the yml configuration file as a Custom Recepie - and the most important part chose Caffe as Runner - if u don't have it on that list use Preferences in main window to install it prior to creation.

After you install the programs you need to Change Launch Options for each program and add --no-hw-ui to the Command Arguments and you are good to go 😆

After that the programs will run - sorta -  since Publisher it's actually unusable crashing without reason just by looking at it - and also if all of them are started together they kinda work on turns - so for now one at a time is safe bet : >

 
L.E : Bottles just got new update with more goodies : https://usebottles.com/blog/release-2022.7.14/
L.L.E : Made slimmed down configuration file to install Affinity in Bottles (deleted everything inside i didn't find necessary) and attached here. The setup files i'm using are the ones i got directly from my serif account and they install without problem.

 
 
AffinityCustomBottleRecipe.yml

It's not up to us to get it working on Linux - as far as we're concerned, it's an unsupported platform, regardless of whether that's native, or via WINE or anything else. 
With regards to the canvas flickering, it uses Direct3D11 to present the document to the screen (separate to the UI rendering in hardware, which is done by WPF/Microsoft). You may have more luck by changing the renderer to WARP in the Preferences, if that is detected (WARP is a software rasteriser for Direct3D).

The UI is rendered via WPF, which by default uses Direct3D9. You can try disabling this, and rendering the UI via software instead with the --no-hw-ui command line parameter... (noting the double hyphen at the start).

I used the .exe files from the Affinity website. IIRC, I believe the .appx version is only available through the Microsoft Store (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), but I don't have access to that version since I bought it directly from Serif instead.
You might need to install the 'dotnet48' package in the dependencies menu. I believe that's what got it running for me. I hope that can get it working on your end.
 

So I tried out Photo, Designer and Publisher in Bottles today (a Wine frontend) with the latest caffe-7.10-1 runner, and they all successfully installed and ran. I can open, edit, save and export documents like I can on Windows. Affinity Publisher can open large documents without crashing.
One big issue at the moment seems to be that the GUI is very glitchy and acts up when you hover over certain elements. Often entire windows can go black and only certain elements can show depending on what part of the window your mouse cursor is. Another issue is that clicking the "Edit in Photo/Designer/Publisher" option in the menu brings up an error message saying "Failed to launch designer - Could not hand over the file to the other application."
All in all, a big improvement over the last time I tried to get it running in Wine a couple of months ago, in which it wouldn't even run at all. We're not there just yet, but I have a feeling we're getting close.
 
Here are some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/k3XpPuF
 
 

Made a video of running Affinity Photo on my Fedora Workstation 36 thru Bottles
AffinityPhotoFedora.mp4 Sorry for lower quality just installed OBS Studio Flatpak and run the auto-configuration wizard at start.  
 

It doesn't matter how big or small you think the linux userbase is, Wine is for people who want to use Windows applications, if the community gets Affinity working via Wine it will cost Serif zero money and people will happily be able to buy Affinity and use it on Linux, Your hatred for linux in this instance is unwarranted, pointless and proves you aren't simply thinking about Serifs money being "wasted" on a platform you clearly don't use, you're apparently just here to hate for the sake of it. Your comments are pointless and I think you know it, stop wasting everyones time.

this is meme worthy logic.

The number of Affinity users (Windows) is even less than the number of Windows users. Pack it up Serif there's no point in making software when 100% of the people on the platform wont use it lol

Too bad that would scare you off. Remember this is not Photoshop, we’re talking about Affinity tools, which are way more considerate on your resources.
And if you’re right and Gnome Boxes does not allow you to pass-through a GPU, then that means it was using my integrated graphics card, which worked perfectly fine in my case

Too bad that would scare you off. Remember this is not Photoshop, we’re talking about Affinity tools, which are way more considerate on your resources.
And if you’re right and Gnome Boxes does not allow you to pass-through a GPU, then that means it was using my integrated graphics card, which worked perfectly fine in my case

The Affinity applications were written from the beginning to be cross-platform: Mac and Windows. Most (I think) of the code is common, but the UI layer needs some platform-specific functions. And there are some additional platform-specific functions (scanning on Mac, System Palettes on Mac, for example). But a good chunk of the code would port over easily.
The biggest issues I see in adding a 4th platform (any 4th platform) come from a combination of development for the platform-unique portions (added staff), QA testing/certification (added staff, largely), customer support staff, and the coordination issues (the code for all the platforms needs to be released at the same time).

These are fair points. When I say "correct" what I mean is a project from the start would be coded to be as agnostic as possible which they've done to an extent. And yes other companies have major cash income to be able to throw at a project like SteamOS, however you'd think they wouldn't have done that if they thought linux wasn't a worth while endeavour.

As for promoting other products, I don't know, people here are really suggesting different products that are on Linux so it's really not competing with Affinity if they have no intentions of coming to the platform but yes, it's bad form. I for one am not trying to drive anyone away from affinity. Affinity suite is barely used by the masses and I believe it to be the better option going forward instead of photoshop (much like I feel linux is the better platform going forward) so I'd only ever recommend Affinity unless people uise Linux. I say it's a shame because the paring of Affinity Suite and Linux would be a power play on Serifs part.

@MattyWS, @Pšenda...
This thread is a Pinned Thread. This can only be done by Serif staff.
I think there is at least one good reason why it is a pinned thread--if for no other reason than to keep the discussion in single place. 
But MattyWS is correct, why not just avoid posting here? It is a legitimate topic.

That is excellent news that you have found a smooth solution to get Photo and Designer working very well on Linux via VM - happy days! Personally though, I wouldn't even try with anything less than 8GB to be on the safe side.
For anyone else reading this post, Gnome Boxes should be available in the relevant Linux software store and you can install Windows plus other Linux distributions. It is also possible to install macOS using Gnome Boxes and online instructions are available on how to do just that.
Here is an introductory guide to Gnome Boxes:
 

Last week I finally got completely fed up with Windows, mainly because once again they pushed updates down my throat that led to another infamous blue screen. So during the weekend I took the time to give Linux (Pop!_OS specifically) another chance without even looking back.
The thing was that yesterday I was in need of access to Affinity’s tools, and so I decided to try the VM approach once again. This time I went with Boxes, which made the process incredibly easy (specially because of the express install it offers). I only needed to give the VM 8 GB of RAM (it probably would’ve worked with only 4) and I was good to go. I’m pretty new to Linux and VMs, so I’m not sure if Boxes too care of the graphic card side of the matter to make use of my Nvidia card, or if it simply stuck to the integrated one, but Designer as well as Photo worked perfectly fine without any issues whatsoever and quite fluently too. I was honestly very impressed