Affinity Photo running on Linux with Bottles

[Muq]

In my experience, saving actually works but only if you resave an already existing project. So I always have a copy of empty afphoto file to create a new project from it. I also can export to any file, like .png, .jpg, .pdf without issue.. The linux I use is Arch preinstalled on SteamDeck, with bottles version 2022.12.14.1.

[Snapseed]

45 minutes ago, Muq said:

In my experience, saving actually works but only if you resave an already existing project. So I always have a copy of empty afphoto file to create a new project from it. I also can export to any file, like .png, .jpg, .pdf without issue.. The linux I use is Arch preinstalled on SteamDeck, with bottles version 2022.12.14.1.

^ Thank you for your excellent advice and I have a question that I hope is not too illogical.

If saving a new project cannot be done, what is the method please of creating the initial empty afphoto file? Thanks.

[NotMyFault]

6 minutes ago, Snapseed said:

^ Thank you for your excellent advice and I have a question that I hope is not too illogical.

If saving a new project cannot be done, what is the method please of creating the initial empty afphoto file? Thanks.

Use one created on a different PC

[Kit Chan]

9 minutes ago, Snapseed said:

^ Thank you for your excellent advice and I have a question that I hope is not too illogical.

If saving a new project cannot be done, what is the method please of creating the initial empty afphoto file? Thanks.

Create a dummy file in Windows/Mac?

[Snapseed]

22 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

Use one created on a different PC

22 hours ago, Kit Chan said:

Create a dummy file in Windows/Mac?

^ Thank you both for those constructive suggestions.

In my case, I'm a 100% Linux user and the Windows users and Mac user I know don't use any Affinity products.

In this Resources section, quite a few people have already shared their projects/designs/images with others for them to download.

Perhaps someone could kindly create something like an empty affinity photo project file for us Linux users to download and use e.g. something along the lines of Project1.afphoto

[NotMyFault]

3 minutes ago, Snapseed said:

^ Thank you both for those constructive suggestions.

In my case, I'm a 100% Linux user and the Windows users and Mac user I know don't use any Affinity products.

In this Resources section, quite a few people have already shared their projects/designs/images with others for them to download.

Perhaps someone could kindly create something like an empty affinity photo project file for us Linux users to download and use e.g. something along the lines of Project1.afphoto

Here you go.

empty.afphoto

[Snapseed]

1 hour ago, NotMyFault said:

Here you go.

empty.afphoto 7.84 kB · 0 downloads

Two words: Many thanks!

Thank you for sharing that file so that anyone in a similar situation can now benefit from your act of kindness. 🙂

[NotMyFault]

Just now, Snapseed said:

Two words: Many thanks!

Thank you for sharing that file so that anyone in a similar situation can now benefit from your act of kindness. 🙂

No worries. I should have provided this earlier.

[ElementalWarrior]

My changes to Wine have been merged that should fix saving for V1. They won't show up in wine's release for a while, not sure when they will show up in wine-staging either.

[dledr0f88]

On 1/27/2023 at 10:30 PM, ElementalWarrior said:

My changes to Wine have been merged that should fix saving for V1. They won't show up in wine's release for a while, not sure when they will show up in wine-staging either.

Thank you so much for your work! That is really awesome of you.
Do you have a profile on https://www.buymeacoffee.com or similar?

[dledr0f88]

Normal .exe installers for Affinity V2 were also released. Hopefully this will make it possible to run V2 on wine soon!
 

 

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, dledr0f88 said:

Hopefully this will make it possible to run V2 on wine soon!

But note that V2 currently requires functions provided by "Windows® 10 May 2020 Update (2004, 20H1, build 19041) or later", though Serif have said they are trying to get it to work on "Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019（1809)" but they have not succeeded yet.

[ElementalWarrior]

On 1/29/2023 at 8:00 AM, dledr0f88 said:

 

 

On 1/29/2023 at 8:00 AM, dledr0f88 said:

Thank you so much for your work! That is really awesome of you.
Do you have a profile on https://www.buymeacoffee.com or similar?

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/elemental7

On 1/29/2023 at 8:02 AM, dledr0f88 said:

Normal .exe installers for Affinity V2 were also released. Hopefully this will make it possible to run V2 on wine soon!
 

 

 I'll try to give it a spin later and see what happens. I doubt that it is much different. But you never know

[ElementalWarrior]

I tried it running wine's in development 8.2 with some of my patches. It starts and gets to the splash screen, but crashes with some graphics device stuff.

I can't rule it out it being my dxcore patch, as it basically just stubs some functions. But without it, the application doesn't really run at all.

[SevenStart]

Any new updates so far?

[PSDfield]

I was thinking about switching to a Linux Laptop for work but it seams only Affinity Photo and Designer V1 work properly with whine, not Publisher and not V2 so far - thanks for sharing your experiences and I realy hope this will change in the future

[nosaj2]

I understand why companies do not make software for linux.  But, you would think they would they would at least dedicate a few hours to working with the wine community. 

[Wanesty]

6 hours ago, nosaj2 said:

I understand why companies do not make software for linux.  But, you would think they would they would at least dedicate a few hours to working with the wine community. 

especially when their main goal and marketing argument is to provide a more human and ethical alternative to adobe's ever growing monopoly...

[ClementiaDomingos]

That's odd. I saw the same topic on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wuantc/affinity_photo_designer_running_on_linux_with/ 

Is this your post? 

 

[Snapseed]

On 3/2/2023 at 11:26 AM, PSDfield said:

I was thinking about switching to a Linux Laptop for work but it seams only Affinity Photo and Designer V1 work properly with whine, not Publisher and not V2 so far - thanks for sharing your experiences and I really hope this will change in the future

There is one way to get the Affinity range of products to work well on Linux and it involves the use of a virtual machine method as described by Hartmut Doering below:

 

 

[Wanesty]

8 hours ago, Snapseed said:

and it involves the use of a virtual machine

you know as good faith, i tried it yesterday, plugged my old 750ti in my motherboard (troubleshooted motherboard PCIe lanes distribution error for a few hours) and installed linux-zen kernel to have working GPU pass-through with correctly assigned IOMMU groups, passed through my GPU, installed win10 on a virtual drive, and after installing it completely, including drivers, i had to choose to either use looking glass, give my VM it's own screen, or rely on spice(VNC style display) and honestly neither were a good solution:

• Spice is just too slow and doesn't allow screen EDID emulation (from my knowledge).
• Looking glass is amazing but it took me so long to correctly setup everything else that it's tedious installation was too much to deal with.
• so the only option was to just plug my display in my 750ti but : i don't want and have to use a hardware KVM switcher for my mouse and keyboard, barrier (synergy alternative to use your mouse and keyboard on two different machines like it's two screens side by side) would be the best alternative but i still need to swap my screen input every time i want to use my main screen in Linux.

i am aware about VMware 3D acceleration, and it's really good ; however you WILL need VMware Pro if you make any money using VMware (~200$ on top of Affinity and a Windows license)

in conclusion : DualBooting or going back to Windows entirely is simply and sadly a better option, but as this point, as many peoples pointed out in similar thread, why even bother using/learning Affinity and supporting Serif and not go back to the big A...

more random but mandatory rant :

Spoiler

i am also not mentioning how heavy NVIDIA drivers are on Windows compared to those on Linux (~850Mib vs ~100Mib(Mesa w/ nouveau) not to mention how well implemented mesa is to the kernel), How heavy windows itself is to run (even on only 5years old hardware, which is really common for most companies..), How bad it is to deploy correctly at company scale, How unstable it can be randomly because of microsoft updates (remember the font search crashes in publisher), How bloat, cobbled together and obscure it is and feel, How bad it's documentation is (you guys use dotnet you know i'm right).

 

Edited March 7, 2023 by Wanesty
grammar

[ElementalWarrior]

Alright I've figured out the magic incantations to get it to run.

- Build and use this version of wine, it includes numerous patches to get it to run: https://gitlab.winehq.org/ElementalWarrior/wine/-/tree/affinity-photo2
- Download the msix version of affinity photo
- Unzip with the unzip command
- Run winetricks dotnet48 renderer=vulkan corefonts
- Copy all the winmd files from a proper install of windows to .wine/drive_c/windows/system32/WinMetadata/Windows.Services.winmd

I think that should be it. It runs shockingly well. Its not as performant as on windows. But it works.

My branch is based off of wine 8.3. Which is the latest release as of like yesterday. It will not get through setup or start properly without changes from my branch linked above.

[Wanesty]

Also, even if at this point we are fairly certain none of the mods nor devs are gonna read or at least take into account this thread past the few first posts:

if you guys actually want to help us with a release that can actually run on wine (v2 since you can control licenses easily), we only need a few things :

•     distribute it as MSI EXE (or zip but i believe you use reg keys for publisher "personas")
•     do not ping nor interact with recent Microsoft UWP and it's store service, stuff like dependencies check and store price check
•     reduce the dotnet requirement to 4.7.03190 so it can run with Mono
•     check less Registry stuff since most dependencies you use are there but not in the reg
•     if the license allow you to, redistribute any libraries(dll) Affinity uses, distribute it in the same folder as photo/designer/publisher.exe
•     and actually you could even distribute a copy of a dxvk/d3dvk dll the same way (and add it to your acknowledgement/license window)

i'm most likely forgetting some stuff but i honestly don't believe it would be that much work for you to build an installer with those settings..

 

Edited March 7, 2023 by Wanesty
formating

[Wanesty]

8 minutes ago, ElementalWarrior said:

it includes numerous patches

maybe try and submit them as patches to the TKG wine setups https://github.com/Frogging-Family/wine-tkg-git
also you're insane bro

Edited March 7, 2023 by Wanesty

[ElementalWarrior]

Just now, Wanesty said:

maybe try and submit them as patches to the TKG wine setups https://github.com/Frogging-Family/wine-tkg-git

I'll try to get them upstreamed to wine (eventually). A bunch of them are just stubbed functions. I'm pretty sure redistributing winmd files is a nono. Although I'm also pretty sure they're effectively just headers (but for c#), so 🤷‍♂️