Affinity Photo running on Linux with Bottles

[Vepar]

I just wanna say - thank you so much for this!

I tried it on Pop OS 22.04, and all 3 programs install and run with this method!

There's some glitches with the canvas but nothing major.

I installed 6.0.0-9.1-liquorix-amd64 kernel though, if that has anything to do with it. Just thought i'd mention it.

 

 

All programs installed without issues, and got to the point where i put my product keys in, and after i clicked agree all of them crashed first run.

After that first crash, each one opened without issue.

I still haven't done anything "taxing" in them as in real work, but so far so good. I'll definitely be testing if it's possible to work normally this way.

 

One minor gripe though, when clicking open file, i can see my home folder, but only home and downloads, not others such as documents and pictures...

Not sure how to fix that particular issue, but for now it's not that big of a deal...

 

Anyway... So far so good, i'll keep on testing if i can use the software this way.

Thank you!

[ElementalWarrior]

I will say that version 2 isn't going to work at all at this moment. there is a library used named dxcore that doesn't seem to have an implementation in wine yet.

And version 1 won't fully work because some of the move/create from my patch aren't merged yet. And I have some feedback to attend to from comments on the merge request before it can be merged. As such saving won't work.

[Vepar]

Yeah, i guess i was happy too soon. Saving doesn't work.

[nosaj2]

Thank you for working on this!

[TadMorose75]

Saving not working ?

In my Installation in all 3 Apps saving works. The only difference is, that i switched to the vaniglia-7.18 runner.

And i have set the bottles permissions in flatseal to a mountpoint with my files.

Edited November 18, 2022 by bitpainter75

[ElementalWarrior]

I've managed to get Affinity Photo v2 running.

It isn't quite something that can be upstreamed to the wine mainline due to a couple of things.

Affinity Photo version 2 is using WinRT. Which requires a collection of winmd files shipped with windows. They are effectively dll files, and would have to to be re-implemented in the wine codebase. And that is something beyond my capabilities. You can get it running by copying the files from a running windows environment, but you would have to own a copy of windows.

 

The procedure to run it is:

• Compile and install my branch of wine.
• copy files from C:/Windows/System32/WinMeta/ from a windows installation to your wineprefix drive_c/windows/system32/WinMeta/
• install dotnet48 via winetricks
• Unpack the msix file with unzip -d where_you_want_the_files affinity-photo-2.0.0.msix
• run regedit and set the renderer to vulkan (see https://wiki.winehq.org/Useful_Registry_Keys)
• symlink dxcore.dll
  • ln -s wine/build-64/dlls/dxcore/x86_64-windows/dxcore.dll ~/.wine/drive_c/photo/SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto2_2.0.0.1640_x64__3cqzy0nppv2rt/App/dxcore.dll
  • I'm not sure why this is required, usually wine auto links these 🤷‍♂️

 

Anyway, the code I got it running with is here: https://gitlab.winehq.org/ElementalWarrior/wine/-/tree/affinity-photo2

Trying to work on top of this is not for the faint of heart.

 

[ElementalWarrior]

I should also note that this is still crashing frequently. There are some more dll library functions to implement.

[WeeHughie]

2 hours ago, ElementalWarrior said:

I should also note that this is still crashing frequently. There are some more dll library functions to implement.

I really appreciate your efforts. I used to hack around a lot - but am getting too tired and too busy so I don't have the time. If you find a way to get this working (and with good instructions ), I'll be forever grateful to you.

[Wanesty]

kinda (really) mad that Serif isn't helping us much with running their softs on wine, like a lot of information about dependencies etc would help up so much.
I get the fact that they need to make a full version if they ever want to make it, and market it as linux compatible, and i assume that's why they aren't helping us at all.
I would also assume that they heard about linux users being 80+% of issues report when/if a company release a linux version of their soft.

But i also believe that there is a middle ground between the two and that they really should stop impeding help us, by giving us some helpful informations to make it run; or to make a wine fork for it if it really is necessary (so devs wouldn't have to retro engineer everything)

I know Serif doesn't owe it to us since it was never talked about anywhere (kinda mad about the "all platforms" v2 announcement hyperbole tho), but as it is with anything regarding Open-Source, it all comes down to morals.

PS: 

On 11/22/2022 at 9:49 AM, ElementalWarrior said:

I should also note that this is still crashing frequently. There are some more dll library functions to implement.

Thank you, genuinely, thank you to the few of you working on that. 

Edited November 25, 2022 by Wanesty
grammar typos

[Adisseba]

Thank you very much.
Affinity was the last program I missed on linux.
I can say hello to Windows

[Snapseed]

On 11/12/2022 at 9:22 PM, eXeler0n said:

Hey, thanks for all the effort. I'm a real noob when it comes to wine. I'll watch this thread and hope you get AP (and may AD) running.

Currently, the only surefire way I know of getting Affinity Photo to work well on Linux is when using Windows as a guest operating system in a virtual environment (VirtualBox or VMware) with 16GB+ of RAM as illustrated in forum member Hartmut Doering's post below:

It's either that or trying out potential alternatives like PhotoGimp, Photopea (also now available in Flatpak form), Krita or PhotoLine + Wine.

[1220dab]

Here's a thought, I tried but was wildly unsuccessful:

Would it be easier to try to run the macos version of AP/AD than the windows version on linux. All i've found thus far is something called "darling" which is a compatibility layer for macos programs on linux, but I think there's basically zero support for ui programs (I've bought the universal license so I have access to both) **note, this is specifically about V2

Edited December 11, 2022 by 1220dab

[Wanesty]

MacOS is way harder to "emulate" and wine took so long to get where it is (and most osx softs are also on windows so not that useful)
so yes, darling is only for cli software at the moment..

 

[1220dab]

Just seeing this now, that's what I figured, sad case. We're still awaiting the msi/exe installer for V2. I'm not really to worried about how long it will take but I wonder if there's a way I can sign up to be notified when its out

[Brian_J]

12 minutes ago, 1220dab said:

I'm not really to worried about how long it will take but I wonder if there's a way I can sign up to be notified when its out

Follow this post and you'll get a notification when the MSI v2 installers are released.

[Brian_J]

Realized I didn’t include the link to the post I was referring in my previous comment. So…

Follow this post and you'll get a notification when the MSI v2 installers are released:

 

[Wanesty]

Msix are basically zip files so you can extract them but in the case of publisher that would also mean most likely not having "StudioLink" features (being able to have designer and photo as a "persona") depending on how it's implemented.

[TotallyNotARobot]

Having followed the instructions (get Bottles from Flatpak, pick Caffe 7.10, choose custom recipe, run the installer within the bottle, change the launch options), I get the error "The software requires a DirectX10 compatible graphics card in order to run." Any setting I should check? I'm running Affinity Photo 1.10.5.1342 with dxvk-2.0-1-12901b5 (toggle enabled) on a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card.

Happy New Year everyone

Edit: it's working under dxvk-1.10.3 here!

[Wanesty]

^ one other fix would be to set wine's windows version to windows 10 (if not already done via the recipe)

[spamnchips]

Hi,

I am trying to install Affinity Photo version 1 in Bottles on a Vmware Virtual Machine running Ubuntu. Everything proceeds OK and AP supposedly installs with a "completed" message but what do I need to do to get the software to run? I can find no pathway to the installed exe file. Stumped at the moment.

[1stn00b]

Why do you use Ubuntu in a virtual machine ? Install Affinity in the host OS not the virtualized one.

[spamnchips]

I have version 2 loaded on my Windows 11 host machine. I am using Photo as a learning project for installing ans using bottles in a VM environment. I have three Linux VM’s, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. I have managed to install Photo on each distro but when trying to run, the splash creen appears followed by another program window which remains empty. The splash screen stays on display.

[TotallyNotARobot]

Is anyone else unable to save files? When I run Affinity Designer (haven't tested this in Photo) and try to save a file, I always get this regardless of where I save it:

Quote

Failed to save document: <Untitled>
Save failed because access to the file was lost.
Do you wish to save the document to a new file?

An obvious culprit could be that the Flatpak sandboxing wouldn't allow me to write, but I've tried creating a custom drive mapping from the Bottles interface for this purpose. Interesting detail: the file handle successfully gets created, the file just happens to contain 0 bytes. It does this consistently. I've never been able to save a file.

[techknowcat]

1 hour ago, TotallyNotARobot said:

Is anyone else unable to save files? When I run Affinity Designer (haven't tested this in Photo) and try to save a file, I always get this regardless of where I save it:

An obvious culprit could be that the Flatpak sandboxing wouldn't allow me to write, but I've tried creating a custom drive mapping from the Bottles interface for this purpose. Interesting detail: the file handle successfully gets created, the file just happens to contain 0 bytes. It does this consistently. I've never been able to save a file.

I cannot safe files, but have successfully exported files and imported them again, so that's something I guess.

[TotallyNotARobot]

I just realized I completely missed ElementalWarrior's post, which already explains why saving won't work:

On 11/18/2022 at 2:26 AM, ElementalWarrior said:

I will say that version 2 isn't going to work at all at this moment. there is a library used named dxcore that doesn't seem to have an implementation in wine yet.

And version 1 won't fully work because some of the move/create from my patch aren't merged yet. And I have some feedback to attend to from comments on the merge request before it can be merged. As such saving won't work.