Affinity Suite V2 on Linux [ Wine ]

[markusdd]

Hi Guys!

I just signed up to a) thank @Wanesty and others for their outstanding work on this and b) to confirm that at least under Fedora/nobara 40 the distrobox method seems to work best. I got that running without issue while with the classic approach Wine would not even compile for me anymore after I upgraded from 38/39 a while ago.

So I figured I might as well put in the effort and document everything I did to make that work. I also pieced together the info from this long thread about  .desktop files with distrobox and and managed to make them generic so the homepath isn't hardcoded and icons are properly found. They are in the doc repo linked below as well.

Pull Requests to these docs are welcome. I do want this to be a competition to the original docs but I was lacking an easy 'copy paste' guide for the distrobox approach so I figured I would make one here:

https://github.com/markusdd/affinity-linux-distrobox/

I hope this also brings in more stability across base system updates because the distrobox is kind of self-contained, I really do not facny repeating this whole process with each large OS update 😅

 

I hope this helps somebody!

[Mike Hansen]

Nice job @markusdd. On my nobara40 install, I had to run the distrobox commands with --root before it would work, but beyond that, works nicely

[markusdd]

uh, that should not be necessary actually. using --root is not really recommended for security reasons.

[Mike Hansen]

Yep I know, but it won't work unless I do it 😛

I get the following error:

Quote

mike@Voyager:~/.local/share/applications$ distrobox create -n arch-noroot -i archlinux
Image archlinux not found.
Do you want to pull the image now? [Y/n]: y
Using default tag: latest
permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: Post "http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.24/images/create?fromImage=archlinux&tag=latest": dial
unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied

 

[markusdd]

yeah I would investigate that if I were you this seems to be some underlying permission issue in your homedir or some other setting.

None of this requires root except the /opt/wines dir creation outside the distrobox.

 

EDIT: just saw your edit. Ok, this is a Docker problem. I would advise to use podman instead, which has much less issues in that regard.

 

If you want to keep using docker make sure your user has the proper docker group on your system so the distrobox can access the socket properly in non-root mode.

The docker-ce install is not really clean on Fedora and related RedHat distros anymore out of the box.

Edited November 3, 2024 by markusdd

[Mike Hansen]

Thanks for the advice I installd podman instead, all works perfectly! Thanks again

 

[markusdd]

sure no problem. I should add that to the readme.

[markusdd]

@Wanesty

The only thing does not work even with the arch distrobox approach above is the export of raster formats like PNG

 

installing mfc140 does noting, installing vcrun2015 breaks all afphoto etc. formats, so is useless and needs rollback.

 

Has there been any consensus what helps here? Is it arch related? Would it be worth trying the distrobox with another distribution?

[mysbyxor]

Succeed with the installation on Endeavour OS but i am left with one problem. StudioLink does not work and i cannot activate products. I am shown "No license installed. Activation will be required next startup" at every start up. When trying to access Designer or Photo i am met with red text saying "App launch required".

 

Is this a common issue or even known to not work at all? Any nice fix?

[Ignore]

Is anyone else also not able to open multiple affinity apps at once? Running one of the three works fine for me, but when i try to start another one simultaneously, it crashes at the font loading at startup

[breathless19]

I have no problem running multiple affinity apps at the same time.   I installed mine in an distrobox Arch container for reference...

[Ignore]

I just configured the .desktop files and restartet my endeavour os, and now i can launch all the apps at once.   

I just quickly made a custom wallpaper on the fly, it works so well

[jhob101]

I recently updated my affinity apps to 2.5.5 and am getting an issue where hotkeys aren't recognised by the app the first time I hit them.

For example 

CTRL + N

doesn't do anything but

CTRL + N + N

will open the new document window.

Anyone know why this might be and how to resolve it?

[Daegalus]

Just an fyi, I have some prebuilt wines with the patches from _avg_

I haven't tested them thoroughly or recently, but the build and release pipeline now works, so I can quickly add patches and make new builds.

These are also build on wine-9.21 and I can keep that updated easily.

These builds are based on wine-tkg, so there are some extras and patches already built-in.

Let me know how they work or if you have problems.

https://github.com/daegalus/wine-tkg-affinity

[jhob101]

50 minutes ago, Daegalus said:

Just an fyi, I have some prebuilt wines with the patches from _avg_

I haven't tested them thoroughly or recently, but the build and release pipeline now works, so I can quickly add patches and make new builds.

These are also build on wine-9.21 and I can keep that updated easily.

These builds are based on wine-tkg, so there are some extras and patches already built-in.

Let me know how they work or if you have problems.

https://github.com/daegalus/wine-tkg-affinity

Apologies for being thick, but how do I build this?  I did try and hunt for some documentation that might enlighten me but couldn't find any.  Thanks!

[markusdd]

1 hour ago, Daegalus said:

Just an fyi, I have some prebuilt wines with the patches from _avg_

I haven't tested them thoroughly or recently, but the build and release pipeline now works, so I can quickly add patches and make new builds.

These are also build on wine-9.21 and I can keep that updated easily.

These builds are based on wine-tkg, so there are some extras and patches already built-in.

Let me know how they work or if you have problems.

https://github.com/daegalus/wine-tkg-affinity

This is a very good effort. I have worked with some of the guys on the Nobara Linux discord to get ON1 Photo Raw to run and we've made great progress so far, having it completely running except the AI sharpener and denoiser. If we can get that merged together somewhen to have on workable wine-tkg platform that can run the whole affinity suite and On1 that would be super nice.

[Daegalus]

5 minutes ago, markusdd said:

This is a very good effort. I have worked with some of the guys on the Nobara Linux discord to get ON1 Photo Raw to run and we've made great progress so far, having it completely running except the AI sharpener and denoiser. If we can get that merged together somewhen to have on workable wine-tkg platform that can run the whole affinity suite and On1 that would be super nice.

You don't, this is a prebuilt release. Just download the package in the releases.

You should be able to use it with rum.

[jhob101]

1 minute ago, Daegalus said:

You don't, this is a prebuilt release. Just download the package in the releases.

You should be able to use it with rum.

ah ok, cheers.

I saw the .BUILDINFO and .INSTALL files and thought something needed to be done with them.

I'll give it a go

[Daegalus]

28 minutes ago, jhob101 said:

ah ok, cheers.

I saw the .BUILDINFO and .INSTALL files and thought something needed to be done with them.

I'll give it a go

I think those are pkgbuild related files for Arch. If I understood everything and configured it right, the Arch package should be installable with pacman on Arch 

[Daegalus]

39 minutes ago, markusdd said:

This is a very good effort. I have worked with some of the guys on the Nobara Linux discord to get ON1 Photo Raw to run and we've made great progress so far, having it completely running except the AI sharpener and denoiser. If we can get that merged together somewhen to have on workable wine-tkg platform that can run the whole affinity suite and On1 that would be super nice.

If you guys turn the changes into a patch file, it can easily be dropped in and a build made. We can make a fork for on1 of my repo to keep it clean or we can add it to the affinity one.

Either way, once there are patch files, the rest is easy.

[bmael]

Hi !

I am writing this message because I have not yet managed to create a working desktop shortcut even following the guide.

This line in the terminal works well :

rum affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3 $HOME/.wineAffinity wine "$HOME/.wineAffinity/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Publisher 2/Publisher.exe"

But the .desktop don't. I'm sorry for my poor capacity. Thanks for your help.

[jhob101]

21 minutes ago, Daegalus said:

I think those are pkgbuild related files for Arch. If I understood everything and configured it right, the Arch package should be installable with pacman on Arch 

I tried arch first but rum didn't like it, just tried fedora and seems to have built.

Will try the later steps and report back how I get on.

I'm running zorin 17.2 - ubuntu 22.04.

[markusdd]

26 minutes ago, Daegalus said:

If you guys turn the changes into a patch file, it can easily be dropped in and a build made. We can make a fork for on1 of my repo to keep it clean or we can add it to the affinity one.

Either way, once there are patch files, the rest is easy.

One required patch is this one to wine-tkg itself: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/commit/48ba724640dcf4364f78058b2882866a297acc40

A second one I don't have handy right now but that changes the return value of a DPI scaling function.

When they eventually rebase to the newer upstream wine this first patch will be in it but right now it needs to be taken in.
Whats a bit more tricky and might cause a conflict is that normal vkd3d is not enough to run on1, as it does not implement all DX12 calls to support DirectML.
So you need to run vkd3d-proton in the wine prefix. So it might be possible to have the same wine-tkg but maxybe not the same wine-prefix. (although I think Affinity tools would not be hurt by using vkd3d-proton instead of normal vkd3d)

As said we still have 2 issues remaining that need figuring out.

Did you publish the patchset from the elemental warrior wine somewhere? Maybe I could play around with my build locally to see how it behaves, I own licenses for On1 and Affinity so it would be easy to check.

[Daegalus]

29 minutes ago, markusdd said:

One required patch is this one to wine-tkg itself: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/commit/48ba724640dcf4364f78058b2882866a297acc40

A second one I don't have handy right now but that changes the return value of a DPI scaling function.

When they eventually rebase to the newer upstream wine this first patch will be in it but right now it needs to be taken in.
Whats a bit more tricky and might cause a conflict is that normal vkd3d is not enough to run on1, as it does not implement all DX12 calls to support DirectML.
So you need to run vkd3d-proton in the wine prefix. So it might be possible to have the same wine-tkg but maxybe not the same wine-prefix. (although I think Affinity tools would not be hurt by using vkd3d-proton instead of normal vkd3d)

As said we still have 2 issues remaining that need figuring out.

Did you publish the patchset from the elemental warrior wine somewhere? Maybe I could play around with my build locally to see how it behaves, I own licenses for On1 and Affinity so it would be easy to check.

Patches from PRs is easy because you can easily download a PR Patch file. 

The different vkd3d is also not an issue for affinity, but that's separate from Wine. I don't think wine-tkg embeds it.

I don't have a patchset for Elemental's stuff because his is just a branch with a bunch of commits ontop of 9.13, but also mixed in with reverts and other stuff. I tried tracking down all the patches he used based on commit messages and find their PRs but not all of them worked right and it was getting messy.

I only have _avg_'s patches added. 

You can find the patches in the custom patches directory in the repo. I have a few others and I enabled childwindow in wine-tkg.

If there are missing changes for Affinity that are critical, I'll find patches for them, or make some out of Elemental's commits when I have time.

Might just be best to make a separate repo for wine-tkg-on1 and add in what is needed for on1 and do the build.

[Ignore]

5 hours ago, bmael said:

Hi !

I am writing this message because I have not yet managed to create a working desktop shortcut even following the guide.

This line in the terminal works well :

rum affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3 $HOME/.wineAffinity wine "$HOME/.wineAffinity/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Publisher 2/Publisher.exe"

But the .desktop don't. I'm sorry for my poor capacity. Thanks for your help.

Can you try if changing '$HOME' to your actual path works?