Affinity Suite V2 on Linux [ Wine ]

[Wanesty]

17 hours ago, Peter Werner said:

about 450 a day isn't bad at all for traffic coming from a niche forum topic. More than 67% Firefox is also interesting.

450 views, as in pages views, the interesting metric is visitors and bounce rate(visitor retention metric)

17 hours ago, Peter Werner said:

my worry is that a standard user expecting Linux to be an alternative to Windows or Mac will try to connect to the server using the GUI and assume for it to just work.

ugh yea you're right, i hate that most people moving to linux will not really bother to really learn their system, but to be fair, it's the same on windows and macos, most people know nothing about their machine, and it kinda makes me sad

16 hours ago, d-7 said:

Btw the Codeberg has much more visibility and SEO than the new website. In Google I only can find with exactly the same name.

mhmmh you said the word, SEO, the website's domain is new and not many keywords attach to it, as long as its link is on the codeberg README it should be fine 😛

16 hours ago, d-7 said:

you should edit the first post and put the link to your docs https://affinity.liz.pet/.

i sadly cannot edit the first post, or any old post for that matter, it is a limitation of this forum and it's the reason i moved to a codeberg repo initially.

i would need a forum moderator/admin to edit it for me, if you're a moderator reading this, please do it or dm me to talk about it

8 hours ago, AwkwardTurtle said:

I ended up running

rum affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3 $HOME/.wineAffinity winetricks --force dotnet48

to uninstall it via the GUI. Then running it again to reinstall (also via the GUI).

should i just remove the --unattended  argument? it could maybe make things easier for debugging

i might add a mention that it can be removed or --force  can be added in its place to troubleshoot

13 hours ago, Peter Werner said:

since we could just distribute the binaries and a Wine prefix with the software pre-installed in trial mode once the solution matures a bit, assuming that is legally possible).

while we can build a packaged wine to distribute, distributing a wineprefix isn't really doable, its size is an issue and if it breaks, the end user would have no idea what to do, not to mention the impossibility to redistribute winmetadata files

[Astonish]

Hello!

I love the new metric web-site! I see that I was the only visitor from Turkey! But now I am in Italy so the numbers will add there!

Having said that, do you think that if the solution about downloading iso and mounting it and extracting the WinMetaData files from it without installing Windows, for people who doesn't have a Windows PC available, could be useful? So when they click on the guide, they find everything there? For me it was a no issue since I have a Windows partition as well (which is having more and more reasons to dissappear as I can now run Affinity on Linux thanks to you guys!) but for others it could be useful and it could be "lost" in the multiple pages of this topic.

May be it could be done in the section of .winmd files of the guide where you say to copy it to the installation. You can may be add a link where you say something like "Click here if you don't have access to a Windows VM or Windows Computer" and that link brings the user to an other page where the steps shown by @Nox are added? I would gladly do it if i knew much about git or coding (yes, for me even making those guides are coding which I am not capable yet! ) but unfortunately I don't have the skills.

Actually after finding this post and trying multiple distros in my earlier posts, now I have completely switched to Linux Mint from EndeavourOS and Fedora and actually I am enjoying using it! (I don't have huge daily package updates!) - sorry for the off-topic comment!

[Peter Werner]

In case anyone is wondering, I just tested running the 2.5.5 update on Affinity Photo on Mint and I haven't run into any issues. Still working fine.

But I noticed another bug to be aware of: There is no prompt to save an open document with unsaved changes (also exists in 2.5.3). So don't rely on this prompt to save your documents, always save explicitly.

[marshmallo]

Hey guys, I dont know if its been mentioned here or not, but I wrote nix packages for the affinity suite.

Its based on the wonderful guides by all of you. https://github.com/mrshmllow/affinity-nix

In my opinion its the simplest way to install the applications on linux, if you can get around installing nix.

Its a single command to install, compile, and update everything, including creating .desktop files.

Edited September 4 by marshmallo

[Garteal]

Thank you to all that made it possible to use the Affinity Suite on Linux!

I've installed the suite about a week ago, and it's been mostly fine (bar the occasional flicker etc), but the biggest problem for me is the crashes that happen when I try to export PNGs. They save fine, but the program crashes. Is anyone else running into this?

It crashes with the following (STATUS_STACK_BUFFER_OVERRUN) exception:

0024:err:seh:NtRaiseException Unhandled exception code c0000409 flags 1 addr 0x6ffffcbf03cc

 

[jhob101]

1 hour ago, Garteal said:

but the biggest problem for me is the crashes that happen when I try to export PNGs. They save fine, but the program crashes. Is anyone else running into this?

Yep, I had that and installing the mfc140 package with winetricks fixed it:

rum ElementalWarrior-wine $HOME/.wineAffinity winetricks -q -f mfc140

Obviously adjust wine prefix etc to suit your install.

Note that a previous fix was to install vcrun2015, but that caused a crash when saving to .afphoto on some systems, mfc140 is a subset of that package and has been totally fine for me, but watch out for that regression as it's not been widely tested yet.

Quote

I've installed the suite about a week ago, and it's been mostly fine (bar the occasional flicker etc)

For the flickering issue you could try a different renderer, vulkan worked for me, see @Wanesty's Guide: 

https://affinity.liz.pet/docs/misc-troubleshooting.html#fixing-flickering-and-other-visual-glitches

[Garteal]

2 hours ago, jhob101 said:

Yep, I had that and installing the mfc140 package with winetricks fixed it:

rum ElementalWarrior-wine $HOME/.wineAffinity winetricks -q -f mfc140

Obviously adjust wine prefix etc to suit your install.

Note that a previous fix was to install vcrun2015, but that caused a crash when saving to .afphoto on some systems, mfc140 is a subset of that package and has been totally fine for me, but watch out for that regression as it's not been widely tested yet.

I saw your post before and already tried installing mfc140, but to no avail. PNG exports still crash. .afphoto saving works flawlessly thankfully though!

Quote

For the flickering issue you could try a different renderer, vulkan worked for me, see @Wanesty's Guide: 

https://affinity.liz.pet/docs/misc-troubleshooting.html#fixing-flickering-and-other-visual-glitches

Yup, I've also set my renderer to Vulkan, otherwise it was unbearable haha. There's still some minor flickering (e.g. when zooming), but it's not as bad as without changing the renderer.

[jhob101]

18 hours ago, Garteal said:

I saw your post before and already tried installing mfc140, but to no avail. PNG exports still crash. .afphoto saving works flawlessly thankfully though!

Ah, that's a shame!  What distro are you using, out of interest?

[Garteal]

4 hours ago, jhob101 said:

Ah, that's a shame!  What distro are you using, out of interest?

I'm on EndeavourOS! Latest updates (&Kernel 6.10.8). When I get some time, I can tinker around with the potential lead you gave me.

[Dusd]

On 8/20/2024 at 8:19 PM, JCristina said:

Thank you Peter.. So far.. The results.

 

Installed without an issue.

 

 

 

Sadly.. Error!!  Might be time to move from Fedora and see is Mint will make it happen... Wish there was a clear issue that could be resolved instead of jumping OS based on apps but, it is what it is I guess.

Oh no!

Just went trough this thread what my issue might be, why i just wasn't able to install the Affinity Suite both on my Desktop and my Laptop, just to find out that Fedora 40 itself is causing the trouble. 😢 

Thank you @JCristina for your Testing!

Is there any News regarding this issue? 
I want to avoid jumping Distros just for getting Affinity to run as much as possible.

I was beeing able to install Affinity on Manjaro some months ago (with a horrible perfomance tho) and wanted to check in into the improvements that were made.

A big thank you to all of you to make this possible in the first place!

[TroKhon]

Hi, I got all 3 Affinity programs running and registering on one of my computers. Works seamless. Version is 5.2.3

But on my other two PCs I can install the Affinity apps ("Setup successful"), but I get an error message from them at start. First it says "Initializing" then it says "An error during start... other Affinity apps not reachable .... make sure .. newest version ... make sure LAN not blocked..." Well, LAN is not blocked, version is almost up to date and the same on all three PC.

The only difference I could find in the log messages during start up is:

0198:fixme:bcrypt:BCryptGenRandom ignoring selected algorithm
0198:err:bcrypt:BCryptGenerateSymmetricKey no encryption support

On the PC where it is running without problems, I only get the first part ("0198:fixme:bcrypt:BCryptGenRandom ignoring selected algorithm") but not the second part. So thats the difference I can see. Checked that bcrypt.dll is in the wine drive C:\Windows\system32  directory. So is it a problem with wine setup ? Not sure where to look....

Forgot to mention:  Kubuntu 24.04

Edited September 8 by TroKhon
Forgot OS Version

[Wanesty]

does anyone else have font rendering too square:

instead of how it should (an old render done on windows):

i also tried affinity v1.10.6 since i had the installer lying around and it also has this issue
it's weird tho because this weight of the font (as well as Black and Medium) have this issue but the Regular, Bold and Italics versions are fine
i also tried doitsujin/dxvk instead of the winehq one and it didn't change anything
the font is Brandon Grotesque but I've seen this behavior on a few different fonts so far

[Peter Werner]

On 9/8/2024 at 7:43 AM, Dusd said:

Is there any News regarding this issue?

Check out my earlier post about it in this thread – TLDR is that I was able to get around it by running the dotnet install winetricks command multiple times without --quiet but with --force. First choose "Repair", then run it again and do "Uninstall", then a third time with "Install". My tests were on Linux Mint.

[Wanesty]

5 minutes ago, Peter Werner said:

On 9/8/2024 at 7:43 AM, Dusd said:

Is there any News regarding this issue?

Check out my earlier post about it in this thread – TLDR is that I was able to get around it by running the dotnet install winetricks command multiple times without --quiet but with --force. First choose "Repair", then run it again and do "Uninstall", then a third time with "Install". My tests were on Linux Mint.

i've seen this a few time and every time it seems to be some issue caused by mono being installed by wine instead of via the distro package so it can already be on the system:
try installing the package wine-mono, remove your wineprefix and start again from there!

[Astonish]

Hello Everyone!

Small update. So after using Linux Mint for some time, since I started writing in this topic, I decided to move because Linux Mint is acting weird on my Desktop, with some weird glitches and to run a stable system, I am running the Arch (EndeavourOS) lol as it runs without glitches. I am triple booting Linux Mint, EndeavourOS and Windows 11.

I noticed that @Wanesty , you have added OpenSuse dependencies as well. I don't know how and where you found them but it works flawlessly.

But my favourite distro is Fedora and now I am doing my best to run it on it. For now I have always failed. I noticed that not having flex and bison is not an optional but it gives an error and stops the command, if i am not wrong while Configuring Wine before compiling it. (I tried it yesterday, I dont remember now which one was it the command.) So I noticed that after a fresh Fedora install, you definitely need:

• flex
• bison
• gcc

As I had to install them. So I don't know if you would prefer to add hem to the dependencies of Fedora?

Even though I did them all, I am still not able to install Affinity. So I am still trying, troubleshooting, If I can fix it (which I doubt) I will report back how I did.

 

EDIT: And thank you so much for adding OpenSuse dependencies as well! If I continue to fail gloriously with Fedora installation, I may be move to OpenSuse, thanks to the update you have made to your guide!

[Daegalus]

1 hour ago, Astonish said:

Hello Everyone!

Small update. So after using Linux Mint for some time, since I started writing in this topic, I decided to move because Linux Mint is acting weird on my Desktop, with some weird glitches and to run a stable system, I am running the Arch (EndeavourOS) lol as it runs without glitches. I am triple booting Linux Mint, EndeavourOS and Windows 11.

I noticed that @Wanesty , you have added OpenSuse dependencies as well. I don't know how and where you found them but it works flawlessly.

But my favourite distro is Fedora and now I am doing my best to run it on it. For now I have always failed. I noticed that not having flex and bison is not an optional but it gives an error and stops the command, if i am not wrong while Configuring Wine before compiling it. (I tried it yesterday, I dont remember now which one was it the command.) So I noticed that after a fresh Fedora install, you definitely need:

• flex
• bison
• gcc

As I had to install them. So I don't know if you would prefer to add hem to the dependencies of Fedora?

Even though I did them all, I am still not able to install Affinity. So I am still trying, troubleshooting, If I can fix it (which I doubt) I will report back how I did.

 

EDIT: And thank you so much for adding OpenSuse dependencies as well! If I continue to fail gloriously with Fedora installation, I may be move to OpenSuse, thanks to the update you have made to your guide!

I run Fedora and Fedora Silverblue, if you give me a day or 2, I can write up which dependencies are needed. My move to Europe is slowing down so I will have some time to start helping out here again.

[Astonish]

8 hours ago, Daegalus said:

I run Fedora and Fedora Silverblue, if you give me a day or 2, I can write up which dependencies are needed. My move to Europe is slowing down so I will have some time to start helping out here again.

Hello! I would be really grateful if you could point me on how to install these apps on Fedora! Thank you! It doesn't matter 3-4 days or weeks, as anyways, all alone I can never manage this. I lack the skills even though I have the good will! lol.

I realized that when I tried to copy the Winmetadata files, my .Wineaffinity folder's system32 and all other folders that are in disk c are empty (there were two folders). So most probably it is something to do during the build process? I installed the wine-mono thru dnf install wine-mono if it makes any change.

I read your old ports this summer and tried using your wine installer for Fedora but then again, I got lost, most probably because of my lack of skills.

Thank you so much at least for the hope! Because Fedora works stable on my both computers, and I love using Hyprland which is now possible very easily (1 year ago, it was harder) and I am tired of 2 gb updates of EndeavourOS or Arch, so I want a distro like Fedora which is mid way between Arch and LTS distros.

Thank you again! I am sure that other people would find this useful too as I saw other people in the thread like @JCristina who tried installing it on Fedora. She succeeded on Nobara, but I prefer Fedora. I prefer a more general distro than a distro that is maintained by a smaller group of maintainers. I have nothing against them, but I find these more general distros more future proof.

[Wanesty]

On 9/13/2024 at 1:43 PM, Astonish said:

I noticed that @Wanesty , you have added OpenSuse dependencies as well. I don't know how and where you found them but it works flawlessly.

it was revealed to me in a dream ("TohurTV" opened an issue on codeberg since they tracked down the openSUSE deps, i've updated it since, see the edits down this post)

On 9/13/2024 at 1:43 PM, Astonish said:

So I noticed that after a fresh Fedora install, you definitely need:

• flex
• bison
• gcc

As I had to install them. So I don't know if you would prefer to add hem to the dependencies of Fedora?

done!
again, i only really try to maintain Arch related stuff and i rely on you guys to tell me about other distros, so ty :)

On 9/13/2024 at 3:40 PM, Daegalus said:

I run Fedora and Fedora Silverblue, if you give me a day or 2, I can write up which dependencies are needed.

mention me when you do so i can edit the doc, also good luck with your move!

16 hours ago, Astonish said:

I realized that when I tried to copy the Winmetadata files, my .Wineaffinity folder's system32 and all other folders that are in disk c are empty (there were two folders). So most probably it is something to do during the build process? I installed the wine-mono thru dnf install wine-mono if it makes any change.

other than an issue with a wrong prefix path set during the wineboot --init process i don't see why this would happen

---

i added the package wine-mono on fedora and openSUSE (was already there for arch) but i can't find it for debian or ubuntu, if any of you know if it goes by an other name or something please tell me so i can add it

i also found out that most WineHQ pages are also available on their GitLab, and i honestly prefer the say it's laid out there so i'm probably gonna change the WineHQ links on the doc to their GitLab ones
https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Building-Wine

 

edit: i'm also adding the link where you can get an up to date list of build dependencies from the package distributors themselves (in the .spec or PKGBUILD files)
but again i am missing the debian/ubuntu one, i cant seem to find the list of build dependencies they use to, well, build the packages they ship with apt(in this instance the package is wine)

so please! tell me if you found said file! here's the fedora, opensuse and arch one, this is what i'm looking for!

edit2: found it i'm tupid, edit 4: better list

edit3: imma also update the lists while i'm at it

[Cidrux]

Hi again, so, I was able to get the programs installed and launching on Linux Mint using Peter Werner's advice to run command

rum affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3 $HOME/.wineAffinity winetricks --force dotnet48

3x, first to repair, second to remove, and third to install. Unfortunately, whenever I attempted to login/activate my Affinity account, the program would crash (specifically when I would click or tab to the password text entry box). I tried some possibly related troubleshooting of deactivating Affinity installs on a Windows dual-boot I have going atm (just to run Affinity, lol) but the problem remained. I also tried the vulkan rendering fix as that solved some problems a few months ago when I had this working, but it didn't solve my problem this time around. It would also kick up a fuss if I tried to run it again and crash on startup a lot. If there's any ideas for troubleshooting that, I did make a backup at that stage so I can go and try to troubleshoot that if anyone has any ideas.

 

I also attempted a few times to install wine-mono (and gecko as it mentioned this was missing too) before creating the prefix. I did this by cd'ing into the wine-install folder (I think? I couldn't quite figure out where to do this until the uninstaller would respond to installing things), running wine uninstaller, and making sure wine-mono-8.1.0-x86.msi was installed (along with wine-gecko-2.47.4-x86.msi and wine-gecko-2.47.4-x86_64.msi as I was getting errors regarding Gecko as well). I tried to choose the correct version following the Wine Mono and Gecko wiki pages and assuming the Wine version is 9.13 and not the incorrect 7.9(?) that is spit out in terminal. Regardless, after all that the same mono error would happen when trying to install dotnet48. Please let me know wherever I may have messed up here.

 

I tried running the new dependencies you just changed in your guide (again I'm running Linux Mint, so I'm using apt)- but it tells me

E: Unable to locate package unicode-idna

I tried everything excluding unicode-idna, but then when I attempt to run the ../configure command it gives me this message at the end:

configure: error: i386 PE cross-compiler not found.
This is an error since --enable-archs=i386 was requested.

And I tried futzing around with the older gcc dependencies but I figured I have no idea what I'm doing and I should just post another message here.

 

I'm beginning to wonder if the issue has anything to do with me doing this on a clean Linux Mint install without wine pre-installed, whereas the previous Mint install I had it working on I'd already used it for a few other things? That's the only differing factor I can think of other than the guide changing, and trying old versions of the guide have proven unsuccessful for me this time around.

Edited September 14 by Cidrux

[Daegalus]

I think we should maybe consider switching our builds to use the WoW64 mode. This lets us compile wine with only 64bit libraries and removes the need for all the i386 libraries. It is what I do on my GitHub builds. Might be worth doing that for simplicity.

[Wanesty]

6 minutes ago, Daegalus said:

I think we should maybe consider switching our builds to use the WoW64 mode

pookiebear i already rewrote it to use the new WoW64 build, and now instead of every x86_32 varients of pkgs it needs mingw-w64-gcc or similar, so @Cidrux try rebuilding wine from scratch with the updated list of dependencies i pushed earlier today(yesterday) to the website and it should fix things! :)
i mean that should at least fix the missing i386 issue you're having :p

[Daegalus]

21 hours ago, Astonish said:

Hello! I would be really grateful if you could point me on how to install these apps on Fedora! Thank you! It doesn't matter 3-4 days or weeks, as anyways, all alone I can never manage this. I lack the skills even though I have the good will! lol.

I realized that when I tried to copy the Winmetadata files, my .Wineaffinity folder's system32 and all other folders that are in disk c are empty (there were two folders). So most probably it is something to do during the build process? I installed the wine-mono thru dnf install wine-mono if it makes any change.

I read your old ports this summer and tried using your wine installer for Fedora but then again, I got lost, most probably because of my lack of skills.

Thank you so much at least for the hope! Because Fedora works stable on my both computers, and I love using Hyprland which is now possible very easily (1 year ago, it was harder) and I am tired of 2 gb updates of EndeavourOS or Arch, so I want a distro like Fedora which is mid way between Arch and LTS distros.

Thank you again! I am sure that other people would find this useful too as I saw other people in the thread like @JCristina who tried installing it on Fedora. She succeeded on Nobara, but I prefer Fedora. I prefer a more general distro than a distro that is maintained by a smaller group of maintainers. I have nothing against them, but I find these more general distros more future proof.

I just remembered I have working Fedora building on my GitHub builds.

Here is a list of the dependencies it uses. Note that some of these might not be needed as they are for the TKG wine build system, so it setups all the tools it uses for automation too. It also uses WoW64, so it only uses the 64bit libraries.

Quote

git make ccache gcc-c++ mingw32-gcc mingw64-gcc SDL2-devel openal-soft-devel opencl-headers ocl-icd-devel libvkd3d-devel icoutils vulkan-devel lcms2-devel gstreamer1-devel gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel libmpg123-devel gtk3-devel libva-devel fontforge fontpackages-devel gsm-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel libudev-devel libv4l-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel lzma audiofile-devel giflib-devel ImageMagick-devel libpcap-devel libXxf86dga-devel mesa-libOSMesa-devel libgphoto2-devel alsa-lib-devel autoconf bison coreutils cups-devel dbus-devel desktop-file-utils flex fontconfig-devel freetype-devel freeglut-devel gawk xz gettext-devel gnutls-devel krb5-devel libattr-devel libieee1284-devel libpng-devel librsvg2 librsvg2-devel libstdc++-devel libtiff-devel libX11-devel libXcomposite-devel libXcursor-devel libXext-devel libXi-devel libXinerama-devel libxml2-devel libXmu-devel libXrandr-devel libXrender-devel libxslt-devel libXxf86vm-devel mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libGLU-devel ncurses-devel openldap-devel sane-backends-devel unixODBC-devel unzip util-linux zlib-devel fonttools wget python-pefile rust cargo glslang patch libpng-static.x86_64 libgcrypt-devel libXpresent-devel yasm jq

 

If you need the 32 bit libraries, here is the list, but it is highly likely to break:

Quote

pkgconf.i686 gcc-c++.i686 glibc-devel.i686 libX11-devel.i686 libXcomposite-devel.i686 libXcursor-devel.i686 libXext-devel.i686 libXi-devel.i686 libXinerama-devel.i686 libxml2-devel.i686 libXmu-devel.i686 libXrandr-devel.i686 libXrender-devel.i686 libxslt-devel.i686 libXxf86vm-devel.i686 mesa-libGL-devel.i686 mesa-libGLU-devel.i686 ncurses-devel.i686 openldap-devel.i686 freetype-devel.i686 SDL2-devel.i686 openal-soft-devel.i686 ocl-icd-devel.i686 libvkd3d-devel.i686 lcms2-devel.i686 gstreamer1-devel.i686 gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel.i686 gtk3-devel.i686 libva-devel.i686 giflib-devel.i686 libpcap-devel.i686 libXxf86dga-devel.i686 mesa-libOSMesa-devel.i686 libgphoto2-devel.i686 alsa-lib-devel.i686 cups-devel.i686 dbus-devel.i686 fontconfig-devel.i686 libpng-devel.i686 libjpeg-turbo-devel.i686 pulseaudio-libs-devel.i686 gnutls-devel.i686 krb5-devel.i686 krb5-libs.i686 libstdc++-devel.i686 vulkan-loader-devel.i686 libv4l-devel.i686 gsm-devel.i686 sane-backends-devel.i686 libXfixes-devel.i686 libpng-static.i686 rust-std-static.i686 libgcrypt-devel.i686 libXpresent-devel.i686

 

[Daegalus]

3 minutes ago, Wanesty said:

pookiebear i already rewrote it to use the new WoW64 build, and now instead of every x86_32 varients of pkgs it needs mingw-w64-gcc or similar, so @Cidrux try rebuilding wine from scratch with the updated list of dependencies i pushed earlier today(yesterday) to the website and it should fix things!
i mean that should at least fix the missing i386 issue you're having :p

Oh, well, I've been a bit distracted, sorry!

[Wanesty]

11 minutes ago, Daegalus said:

Here is a list of the dependencies it uses. Note that some of these might not be needed as they are for the TKG wine build system, so it setups all the tools it uses for automation too. It also uses WoW64, so it only uses the 64bit libraries.

i got the list from the .spec build file on fedora's packages website, i reformated it and all the BuildRequires are in the list under the dnf tab in the dependencies "chapter"

10 minutes ago, Daegalus said:

Oh, well, I've been a bit distracted, sorry!

dw, fyi the guide has been written with it since the wine 8.14 branch :p

[Daegalus]

4 minutes ago, Wanesty said:

i got the list from the .spec build file on fedora's packages website, i reformated it and all the BuildRequires are in the list under the dnf tab in the dependencies "chapter"

Looks great to me.