Affinity Suite V2 on Linux [ Wine ]

[wonderings]

48 minutes ago, jhob101 said:

Confirmed Linux market share is now at 4.45% (possibly higher), up 1.3% in last year:

https://ostechnix.com/linux-market-share-july-2024-report/

Come on Affinity, get working on linux-native versions!

Any idea on what would cause the dropping of users in a few of those months?

[Peter Werner]

2 hours ago, wonderings said:

Any idea on what would cause the dropping of users in a few of those months?

It's any time someone from Serif makes a forum post saying "We currently have no plans for a Linux version of Affinity." 😆

But seriously, let's maybe keep this thread focused on troubleshooting Wine, as there are plenty of other threads already discussing Linux market share.

[Astonish]

Hello! I am glad that you found a distro where the installation worked! May be I should have installed Gnome version instead of the KDE version, but I will never know. I don't have the courage to install it all over again ;D

[Pacific]

On 8/3/2024 at 2:28 AM, Daegalus said:

Actually, if you use `rum` from the guide, you can just extract the zip into

/opt/wines/wine-tkg-affinity

and then you can use rum to deal with it, just like in the guide.  the binary would be under

/opt/wines/wine-tkg-affinity/bin/win

if extracted right.

hey i did ran affinity through this wine and opencl box tick but canvas is not showing

[Wanesty]

On 8/22/2024 at 1:49 AM, jhob101 said:

What are the regressions to look out for?

I've not spotted any in my, admittedly limited, testing so far.

some people, myself included had an issue with vcrun2015 where exporting to raster files would be flawless but saving to afphoto / afpub / afdesign files would hang or crash affinity

[anasTheSuperUser]

On 8/20/2024 at 2:35 AM, Wanesty said:

and even intel integrated graphics seems to cause issues, guessing from the amount of people reporting massive visual glitches on their laptop (since most laptops are using intel iGPUs)

so while i don't think you'll get openCL acceleration, it should maybe work fine

the package for intel is

intel-compute-runtime

the problem was related to bottles being isolated and not having an opencl driver

trying with the native meathod

sorry for late reply

[jhob101]

1 hour ago, Wanesty said:

some people, myself included had an issue with vcrun2015 where exporting to raster files would be flawless but saving to afphoto / afpub / afdesign files would hang or crash affinity

Just tested this on mine, and I can save to .afphoto flawlessly.

Hopefully also resolved for others who saw the regression previously.

[Wanesty]

worked on porting the guide to web: https://affinity.liz.pet

i still have stuff to do but ultimately it should be more comfortable to navigate, especially if i manage to add vuepress's search plugin
i would also like to change the color scheme to cuterose
for the meantime you can give feedbacks

 

1 hour ago, jhob101 said:

Just tested this on mine, and I can save to .afphoto flawlessly.

i'm assuming you tested with vcrun2015, if that's the case, then yea, one more example of it being very machine specific ahah

[jhob101]

33 minutes ago, Wanesty said:

i'm assuming you tested with vcrun2015, if that's the case, then yea, one more example of it being very machine specific ahah

That's with mfc140, I'd not managed to get vcrun2015 to install previously so haven't done any testing with that.

But for me, with mfc140, I can save both .afphoto & export without crashing.  

[Wanesty]

12 minutes ago, jhob101 said:

But for me, with mfc140, I can save both .afphoto & export without crashing.  

noice, i really need to try it on my side and add it to the guide

[Pacific]

With vkd3d-proton enbaled without dxvk, with vulkan redered, affinity works quite well for me now

[Astonish]

23 hours ago, Wanesty said:

worked on porting the guide to web: https://affinity.liz.pet

i still have stuff to do but ultimately it should be more comfortable to navigate, especially if i manage to add vuepress's search plugin
i would also like to change the color scheme to cuterose
for the meantime you can give feedbacks

Looks beautiful and already bookmarked the page! Thank you very much for your time and efforts!

[junklont]

@Wanesty@__avg__

Thank you very much for the new guide and features. I recently found out that you updated everything, it looks much simpler and cleaner. Today I am testing the new branch with all the patches, it looks great!

Thank you very much, soon I will come to ask you for any bug.

[d-7]

I have made an script installer base on the Affinity WINE Docs of wanesty here is the repo Affinty on Linux on GitHub. And finally I can use Affinity Photo on Linux 🥳🥳

It is a little buggy but it works. I hopes it gets improving.

[Daegalus]

@d-7 fantastic job, my only suggestion is to add an option to choose Flatpak or System package manager. Official Bottles recommends flatpak and tends to treat system installed one as unsupported. 

[Peter Werner]

I finally gave it a try under Linux Mint, without success at first, but now it works. The installer crashed reproducably at some point during the installation. So I made a second attempt, starting from scratch, and then another with a clean Wine prefix.

First I thought I might have a conflict with the system Wine (which I didn't remember installing, but turns out installing the winetricks package using the system package manager as recommended in the guide pulls the distribution's wine in as a dependency).

Running "./wine --version" in the "wine-install" directory spits out "wine-7.9-15231-ga7c9b19e1a2", whereas I would have expected version 9.13 after running "git switch affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3". However, it turns out running "wine --version" for the system Wine gives me "wine-6.0.3 (Ubuntu 6.0.3~repack-1)", so the wrong version number can't be the system Wine interfering. I assume that the new branch just misreports its version information. So this doesn't seem to be the cause of the problems.

Then I thought maybe setting Wine to Windows 11 and using a WinMetadata folder from a Windows 10 installation might be the cause of the issues. But alas, setting the prefix to Windows 10 didn't help either.

The first actual error I always encountered during the installation process when following the guide was when running rum to initialize the prefix, which gave me this error

rum affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3 $HOME/.wineAffinity wineboot --init
Error! Path to wine version doesn't exist!
Wine versions available:

So rum somehow couldn't find Wine in that wine-install folder in the Documents directory. Hence I manually created the /opt/wines/ folder, moved the wine-install folder into it and renamed it to affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3.

After some digging, I found that this part (and also the one for creating a link to wine named wine64 in the bin directory, which doesn't seem to be necessary) seems to erroneously have disappeared in the new fancy guide compared to the older codeberg guide.

This let me run rum and proceed.

However, in my second attempt, when installing dotnet48 using winetricks, I realized the installation didn't actually succeed. Instead it gave me this warning:

warning: This package (dotnet48) is broken in wine-7.9-15231-ga7c9b19e1a2. Broken since 5.18. See https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49897 for more info. Use --force to try anyway.

So I ran the command again using --force, assuming that the issue isn't relevant for our purposes, as this seems to have worked fine for others. Alas, when trying to run the installer, I ran into the "mscoree.dll not found, IL-only binary (installer file name) cannot be loaded" problem. So I ran the dotnet installation again and set the wine prefix to Windows 11 again. Multiple times. No change.

I also tried changing the library overrides for mscoree.dll in winecfg, but to no avail.

Without the dotnet48 package, the installer launches and crashes during installation, but with the dotnet48 package installed, it gives the mscoree.dll not found error and doesn't launch.

So I left out the --unattended flag to see what the installer GUI might tell me. Turns out that it complains that the same or a higher version of .NET Framework 4 has already been installed on this computer.

After dismissing this dialog, suddenly an installer popped up that offered me to repair the .NET Framework installation. After going through that, the same "IL-only binary" error remained.

I also tried this tip here and renamed the "/windows/mono" folder. This didn't help either, so I reverted it to its original name.

Then I tried uninstalling .NET Framework using the installer GUI (i.e. without the --unattended flag) and re-installing it using the commandline again.

This let me launch the Affinity installer, offering to repair the Publisher installation (which was incomplete from the test run without dotnet48 installed). The install ran until the end without crashing.

With this, Publisher launched successfully. Overall, it took about 4 hours of tinkering, so the process is nowhere near end user ready yet.

Tip for the Icon: Under Linux Mint, if you open the Publisher.exe file, it will load the PE executable inside the Gnome Archive Manager application. This shows different parts and sections of the PE as files and folders, so you can go and extract the file Publisher.exe/.rsrc/ICON/7 as .wineAffinity/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Publisher 2/Publisher.png and then specify the path to that in your .desktop file under Icon=... . The icon seems to get extracted in PNG format, so no need to convert from ICO, just give it a .png extension.

First impressions: Works great with only a few glitches.

• With the GL renderer canvas disappears when a menu pops open, when typing into a text field in the transform panel, or briefly when changing tools, but activating the Vulkan renderer fixes these issues (HP Z620 workstation with 32 cores, graphics card should be an ATI Radeon RX570 I believe)
• If a panel or document window is ever detached to floating state, it can never be reattached ever again. The "Reset Studio" command in the Window menu is your friend.
• Alt+dragging an object to duplicated drags the window as this is captured by the window manager, so I'll probably just have to deactivate that feature in the system.
• Changing the UI language always reverts to the system default, even after a relaunch of the application, and changing the default CMYK color space also doesn't seem to persist across launches, so likely preferences cannot be saved
• Fonts are not anti-aliased, but I still need to install the corefonts/allfonts package and there seem to be some registry hacks to enable font smoothing
• I'll also have to see if color management and screen calibration works reliably with the rest of the system
• Saving .afpub files does not in fact cause a crash
• I can even drag files from the Linux file manager into the Publisher window
• So far, no crashes at all. I experienced one 3-second lag once, that's it.
• Even typing Japanese with Mozc works (it pops up an input field and then inserts the text). The spacebar no longer temporarily activates the hand tool as long the Mozc IME is active, but that's not a big deal
• Show in Explorer opens the Wine Windows Explorer, not the native file manager
• After quitting the application, the .afpub~lock~ file remains
• The application cannot be launched by double-clicking an .af* file in the file manager. It seems like it tries to launch it, but there are errors.

Big thanks to all who got us this far! Aside from the rather bumpy installation process, this seems very close to being very usable!

[d-7]

1 hour ago, Daegalus said:

@d-7 fantastic job, my only suggestion is to add an option to choose Flatpak or System package manager. Official Bottles recommends flatpak and tends to treat system installed one as unsupported. 

I haven't tested the bottles-script.sh only with rum, but the script of bottles what does is look if bottles is installed via the distribution package manager or via flatpak.

https://github.com/arksys-os/affinity-on-linux/blob/main/affinty-wine-bottles.sh

if [ -d "$HOME/.local/share/bottles" ]; then
    BOTTLES_RUNNERS_PATH="$HOME/.local/share/bottles/runners"
elif [ -d "$HOME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles" ]; then
    BOTTLES_RUNNERS_PATH="$HOME/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/runners"
else
    echo "Error: Could not determine Bottles installation path."
    exit 1
fi

[Wanesty]

1 hour ago, Peter Werner said:

which doesn't seem to be necessary) seems to erroneously have disappeared in the new fancy guide

HOW THE f*** DID I MISS HTAT, FIXING IT RN SORRY

[Wanesty]

1 hour ago, Peter Werner said:

After some digging, I found that this part (and also the one for creating a link to wine named wine64 in the bin directory, which doesn't seem to be necessary) seems to erroneously have disappeared in the new fancy guide compared to the older codeberg guide.

fixed https://affinity.liz.pet/docs/3-wineprefix_setup.html, i don't know how i missed that, sorry :p
 

1 hour ago, Peter Werner said:

This package (dotnet48) is broken in wine-7.9-15231-ga7c9b19e1a2. Broken since 5.18

@ElementalWarrior would there be a way to fix the fork from returning a wrong version ?
 

1 hour ago, Peter Werner said:

the installer launches and crashes during installation, but with the dotnet48 package installed, it gives the mscoree.dll not found error and doesn't launch.

i need to add a mention in the guide that you can extract the msix installer like a zip and copy stuff in your program files to install it-

that is kinda last resort tho since if the installer doesn't work, you'll likely have issues in the app itself
 

1 hour ago, Peter Werner said:

so the process is nowhere near end user ready yet.

yep, said process varies heavily from machine to machine and some "random" bugs can cause what you had
 

1 hour ago, Peter Werner said:

If a panel or document window is ever detached to floating state, it can never be reattached ever again. The "Reset Studio" command in the Window menu is your friend.

yep this is why i advise to create a studio preset :)

[Daegalus]

@d-7 oops, that is completely my bad, I skimmed too quickly. All good

[d-7]

2 hours ago, Daegalus said:

@d-7 oops, that is completely my bad, I skimmed too quickly. All good

I finally only install with flatpak, but after testing on virtual machine the bottle script (affinity-wine-bottles.sh) I couldn't create the bottle correctly via CLI. So if someone knows notify me.

[Peter Werner]

8 hours ago, Wanesty said:

HOW THE f*** DID I MISS HTAT, FIXING IT RN SORRY

Haha, no worries. Thanks so much for the guide, no way I could have done it without.

By the way, feel free to copy and paste the hack for retrieving the application icon from the Publisher executable for the .desktop file to the "Desktop Shortcuts" section if you want.

8 hours ago, Wanesty said:

you can extract the msix installer like a zip and copy stuff in your program files to install it

When the installation of the dotnet48 package using winetricks fails (or when it doesn't even try to install it, which seems to consistently be the case unless you use --force), it seems to fall back on some sort of built-in Mono that causes the crash in the Affinity installer. The Affinity installer runs almost all the way through before it crashes, so I tried running the Publisher.exe that gets installed to see if it would work, and it crashed, too. Hence extracting the .msix manually most likely wouldn't fix the problem. It really seems to need the dotnet48 package.

But running the dotnet48 installation with the GUI (omitting the --unattended flag for winetricks) and chosing the "Repair" option, then running it again and choosing "Uninstall", then running it again using the --unattended flag seems to fix the "mscoree.dll not found" issue.

I think that might be useful to include as a troubleshooting tip in the guide (as well as the point about including the --force option for installing dontnet48 using winetricks), as several people including @JCristina seem to have run into the same problem.

8 hours ago, Wanesty said:

yep this is why i advise to create a studio preset

Yeah, but I'll have to check if this persists across launches, since any changes to other kinds of preferences do not seem to get saved for me.

For now, I'll probably work around that by copying preferences files from a Windows installation so I don't get SWOP colors every time I create a new document.

[Wanesty]

59 minutes ago, Peter Werner said:

I think that might be useful to include as a troubleshooting tip in the guide

i had this mscoree.dll issue before but i would need to reproduce it and your fix to confidently add it in the guide
 

1 hour ago, Peter Werner said:

as well as the point about including the --force option for installing dontnet48 using winetricks

winetricks tells you to try it, so i don't know how interesting it would be to include in the guide
 

1 hour ago, Peter Werner said:

Yeah, but I'll have to check if this persists across launches, since any changes to other kinds of preferences do not seem to get saved for me.

if you save the studio preset, said preset will be saved, BUT you might have to select it every time

and yes copying settings from a windows install, while annoying is a functioning workaround

[Mike Hansen]

Script works on Tuxedo OS 3 (Ubuntu 22.04 modded) with Vulcan rendering engine. Great job guys!

Oh do you guys know if there is a way to change the UI to 125%?

[d-7]

Today I face this problem on Linux when launching the app, "Affinity Photo" was installed the 2024-08-28 and I don't have a firewall activated.

"Sorry there was a problem launching the application. Cannot communicate with other Affinity apps. Please ensure the app is up-to-date and that your firewall isn't blocking local network traffic."

 

Well after rebooting, now is working again. I log in with the account just in case (because I have the V2 Universal License).

Edited August 29, 2024 by d-7