Affinity Suite V2 on Linux [ Wine ]

[Imonobor]

Hey, I got Affinity working on Nobara 42! A huge thank you to all the wonderful people (and penguins) that made this possible! ❤️

 

I have a few questions/problems though:

- no matter what I do I can't get Hardware Acceleration (OpenCL) to work on my RX 6600 XT. Is it even possible to do on an AMD GPU currently?

- Is there any way to scale the UI a bit to make it bigger? It's tiny on my monitor.

- How can I get "open with" dialogue to work? It correctly launches Affinity, but doesn't open the file I clicked, as if I had started it from the shortcut - gives me the "create new project". This also happens when for example in Designer you click "Edit in Photo" - opens Affinity Photo, but without the file.

[JFIA]

23 hours ago, Antibarbarus said:

I’ll try to explain things as clearly as I can and be as granular as I can, while keeping it simple and easy to follow.

DUDE. This is great, and hopefully will help a bunch of people!

[Open Grafica]

On 5/29/2025 at 2:45 PM, Antibarbarus said:

Last year I’ve had success with compiling ElementalWarrior’s initial wine forks and getting Affinity mostly working, but I subsequently had lots and lots of errors and issues following guides using these newer pre-compiled versions. I never wanted to use Bottles or Heroic or other game launchers because of the overhead. As I’m already using the official Wine for other apps, this meant using rum to manage the Affinity prefixes in an easy and seamless way. Since a lot of folks are having trouble installing Affinity I thought I’d chime in with my method as it could prove useful. 

All this has proven to be simpler for me, once I figured out the proper commands and sequences, though many may still prefer to use a GUI manager. By now I’ve done this multiple times on an Ryzen 5 AMD laptop with integrated AMD graphics and on a desktop with an Nvidia GPU, with several pre-compiled versions of wine, and it works very well. I only installed Photo 2, but I see no reason why this wouldn’t apply to the whole suite. Note that I am on Arch so YMMV on other distros, older hardware etc.

I’ll try to explain things as clearly as I can and be as granular as I can, while keeping it simple and easy to follow. Obviously I can’t explain every single variable, option or nuance, but I think following along is possible even with just a basic understanding of Linux. At the very least winetricks needs to be installed on the machine, and there may be some other requirements I’m not aware of that I have installed previously. There are also multiple instances where things could be done differently, or altered slightly to preference, but again, this is easy for those who are already familiar with how things work, but might be too much for folks who just want to get it working.

Prep work

Before we get to the install there are some minor things to get in order to make the process much clearer. Any file manager will do for these steps.

0. Create a folder named Affinity in the root of the home directory
1. Create an Apps folder inside it
2. Download rum and move it to ~/.local/bin
3. Download wine-tkg-affinity and move archive to ~/Affinity
4. Download WinMetadata and move archive to ~/Affinity
5. Download affinity exe installer and move it to ~/Affinity
6. Extract WinMetadata folder, extract wine-tkg-affinity "usr" folder and rename it "wine-tkg-affinity"
7. Edit rum script

Regarding step 7, open rum in a text editor, find line 3 and give it the full path of the Affinity folder we just created. It should look something like this: 

wines="/home/uname/Affinity"

Simply replace the uname with your username.

8. Open a terminal and run 

chmod +x ~/.local/bin/rum

to make rum executable.
 

At the end of this process we should have a folder structure that looks like this:

├── Affinity
│   ├── affinity-photo-msi-2.6.3.exe
│   ├── Apps
│   ├── wine-tkg-affinity
│   │   ├── bin
│   │   ├── include
│   │   ├── lib
│   │   ├── share
│   │   └── src
│   ├── wine-tkg-affinity-archbuilt.tar.zst
│   ├── WinMetadata
│   │   ├── Windows.AI.winmd
│   │   ├── ...
│   │   └── Windows.Web.winmd
└   └── WinMetadata.zip

So, we created an Affinity folder in the home directory and told rum to look for wine prefixes there. Moving forward, we’ll actually be installing our apps within that same Affinity folder to keep everything neat and tidy.

Installation

We’ll be using the terminal to install everything, and thanks to all the prep work we’ve done, it should all be very simple.

Note that on my machine ~/.local/bin is in my PATH, meaning that any executable files I run are auto-detected. If the commands below won’t work because the system doesn’t detect rum, it might be necessary to replace "rum" with "~/.local/bin/rum".

Here we go.

1.

rum wine-tkg-affinity ~/Affinity/Apps wineboot --init

Notice the sequence - we’re telling rum to use a specific wine located in the folder we told it to monitor, and initialise a prefix in a specific folder. Wine tends to have very chatty output that can clutter things up, so once this command and it’s finished, I run clear to erase all that mess, but closing the terminal window after the command has finished and running the next command in a fresh terminal is good too.

2.

rum wine-tkg-affinity ~/Affinity/Apps winetricks vcrun2022 dotnet35 dotnet48 dxvk vkd3d renderer=vulkan win11

This is the big one, basically we’re using winetricks to download and install all the different packages we need as well as preferred settings in a single go. Installers will pop up and we’ll need to click through them, I prefer this interactive way as can monitor the progress. Many error/warning messages will be scrolling in the terminal and that’s completely fine. As long as every installer completes successfully and winetricks moves on to the next one, we’re good. I haven’t had any errors with this sequence, but again, YMMV. Note that there is no allfonts package (see below).

3.

rm -r ~/Affinity/Apps/drive_c/windows/Fonts

This removes the empty Fonts directory in the Affinity prefix we created so that we can run the next command.

4.

ln -s ~/.local/share/fonts/ ~/Affinity/Apps/drive_c/windows/Fonts

Since I’m not using Windows, I like to point Affinity fonts to my Linux user fonts folder where I place all the custom fonts I use. The benefit of this approach is that any future fonts I add there will be available to Affinity. If this isn’t useful, then Affinity can point to the Linux system fonts directory, or to Windows/Fonts for dual boot systems, to prevent needless duplication. If, on the other hand you’d rather not do any of this, simply add allfonts before vcrun2022 in step 2, and skip steps 3 and 4.

5.

cp -r ~/Affinity/WinMetadata ~/Affinity/Apps/drive_c/windows/system32/

Here we are just copying the WinMetadata info to the prefix.

6.

rum wine-tkg-affinity ~/Affinity/Apps wine ~/Affinity/affinity-photo-msi-2.6.3.exe

Here we are telling rum to use the specified wine version and install Affinity. The installer should appear and it should look normal. Sometimes it might be just a black rectangle, no text or options, but pressing enter will actually install Affinity anyway. As long as there are no explicit error popups, you should be good to go.

7.

rum wine-tkg-affinity ~/Affinity/Apps wine ~/Affinity/Apps/drive_c/Program\ Files/Affinity/Photo\ 2/Photo.exe

After the install has completed, we should run it and test it out. Depending on... something, in some cases the Affinity splash screen will be either all black, or with glitched rounded corners, or it could look normal. AFAIK this doesn’t affect the rest of the software in any way.

8. Follow wanesty’s guide for creating a .desktop shortcut

Note that the Exec path will be slightly different than the guide. Also note that full paths are needed for the shortcut (uname = your username): 

/home/uname/.local/bin/rum wine-tkg-affinity /home/uname/Affinity/Apps wine '/home/uname/Affinity/Apps/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Photo 2/Photo.exe

Additional notes

Modifying settings

You can clone the settings from your Windows install and copy them over to Affinity, or get the defaults from here. Either way, they go in ~/Affinity/Apps/drive_c/users/uname/AppData/Roaming/Affinity/Photo/2.0/Settings.

Using ElementalWarrior’s fork

Note that you don’t have to use wine-tkg-affinity, you can download a pre-compiled version of ElementalWarrior’s fork and use that instead. You will need to modify the rum commands - replace all instances of "wine-tkg-affinity" with "affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3", which is the folder where you should extract the archive into (ex. "rum affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3 ~/Affinity/Apps wineboot --init").

If you create a separate install folder next to Apps, using rum you can have two installs of Affinity in two different folders using different wine versions active at the same time, though this is only useful for testing purposes. So you’d run one set of commands to install one version, for instance using "rum wine-tkg-affinity ~/Affinity/Apps wineboot --init", and another using something like this: "rum affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3 ~/Affinity/TestInstall wineboot --init".

The pre-compiled ElementalWarrior’s fork is much larger than the tkg version and also much older wine. However, unless you plan on using that version of wine for everything on your system, this is no obstacle. I’ve found that tkg version works basically the same except for the splash screen which always renders correctly using Elemental’s fork. In case the tkg version doesn’t work for you, I would certainly try the older Elemental one and see how it goes. On the other hand, if you have a working setup and have no issues with it, I wouldn’t mess with it just for the sake of having a newer wine version as a base.

I was out for work and came back today, I read your guide, I was planning to create a report of the detailed steps of the Wanesty guide as mentioned in my last post, but first I also tried your solution, and even in this case, for me it failed despite having followed the whole procedure step by step, now I think I made a bit of a mess with the versions of wine, and to avoid problems I will proceed with the umpteenth formatting, question, in your guide I read that you use Arch right? if Photo works for you I assume Publisher and Designer also work, in theory...

I can make a last attempt with Arch if there are the assumptions that all the Affinity programs work,

[Antibarbarus]

1 hour ago, Open Grafica said:

I was out for work and came back today, I read your guide, I was planning to create a report of the detailed steps of the Wanesty guide as mentioned in my last post, but first I also tried your solution, and even in this case, for me it failed despite having followed the whole procedure step by step, now I think I made a bit of a mess with the versions of wine, and to avoid problems I will proceed with the umpteenth formatting, question, in your guide I read that you use Arch right? if Photo works for you I assume Publisher and Designer also work, in theory...

I can make a last attempt with Arch if there are the assumptions that all the Affinity programs work,

Yes, I’m on Arch, everything’s updated, etc. Just in case a couple of minutes ago I installed Designer in the same prefix where I have Photo working, and it installs without issues. I created a new project, slapped on some assets on it, exported it as png, saved the project, closed Designer, opened it up and loaded the project file, all without crashes, errors or glitches. So based on this very limited testing, I’d say as long as Photo installs and works correctly, the other apps should too.

If you’ve made several installs already all sorts of things could go wrong if you use the same prefixes (install locations) over and over. Wine, like Windows, isn’t really that good at uninstalling the various Windows components it installs into a prefix, and switching wine versions on the same prefix is never a good idea, IMO. So for example, if I switched wine versions, and then tried to install an Affinity product in the same ~/Affinity/Apps folder and stuff was already in there, this would certainly cause issues. The advantage of rum and other wine containerization systems is that you can simply delete that entire install folder and then reinstall cleanly by re-creating an empty folder where wine will put all its stuff into.

One thing that I’ve found helpful in getting everything to work when I had issues was following the terminal output during steps 6 and 7. Oftentimes you will see some errors that will point you in the right direction. For example, I had trouble getting the installer to even start, when I managed to work around that, Photo wouldn’t start beyond a splash screen, and the errors in the terminal output pointed me in the right direction. It turned out that the root cause of my issues were .net errors, namely I had to have dotnet35 and dotnet48 installed in the wine prefix for it to work correctly for me. It took me a lot of trial and error to figure this out but now it’s smooth.

Not to belabour the point, but if you already had a wine prefix set up and then you try to retroactively install dotnet35 and dotnet48 for instance, it likely won’t produce the correct results as when using the process on a clean prefix with nothing on it. Also, if you by chance had dotnet48 already installed, dotnet35 will not install. If you uninstall dotnet48, and then install dotnet35 + 48, they will install but incorrectly, and again nothing will work as expected. These are some of the joys of wine. The order of everything matters.

[Antibarbarus]

On 5/29/2025 at 3:44 PM, Imonobor said:

- Is there any way to scale the UI a bit to make it bigger? It's tiny on my monitor.

- How can I get "open with" dialogue to work? It correctly launches Affinity, but doesn't open the file I clicked, as if I had started it from the shortcut - gives me the "create new project". This also happens when for example in Designer you click "Edit in Photo" - opens Affinity Photo, but without the file.

For the first point, you want to open winecfg for your prefix, go into the Graphics tab and play around with the DPI scale. This will scale the size of the entire app. On hidpi screens something in the range 144-192 works nicely.

The second point will depend heavily on how the software works, and methinks that Affinity is still glitched in this regard, probably the same thing that prevents it from saving settings prevents it from properly parsing Linux filepaths or something. I just tried to use the terminal to explicitly pass the filepath to the program and it exhibits the same behaviour. I even tried playing around by mounting the Documents folder as it’s own drive in wine and passing that on to the program, no dice.

This is academic, but the proper way to handle this would be to create .desktop shortcuts for specific mimetypes (linux equivalent to a file extension). So you would create a file that looks something like "wine-extension-afphoto.desktop" in your .local/share/applications and inside you would tell it to appear only on certain mimetypes. You would also place a special exec command, appending %f at the end. That sort of tells the app to expect a filepath from the selected file in the filemanager to load. But the net effect of that should be the same as what I did in the terminal, and I would expect neither to work, sadly.

Edited May 31 by Antibarbarus

[zioncommander]

Hello everyone,

Some people still have installation problems and I myself had a lot of trouble being new to Linux. Many newcomers have recently arrived on Linux. I ended up finding a replicable workflow (after days of testing) without any command prompt via Bottles that I'm going to share with you as best I can. Also I didn't want to run auto scripts that I don't understand.

Installing dotnet properly on Bottles was by far the most complicated. For example, dotnet35 doesn't install properly most of the time and if dotnet48 is installed, the affinity installer won't launch. So you have to follow everything in the right order.
The advantage of Bottles is that everything is quickly adjustable via the GUI and you can manage rights via flatseal.
Let's go

A/ My config

• Bazzite 42 Desktop KDE (Fedora / wayland)
• Nvidia RTX card

B/ Prerequisite

- On a Windows installation (10 or 11), retrieve the `WinMetadata` folder and paste it temporarily on the Linux desktop:
    - C:/windows/system32/WinMetadata
        - Or get the online file from :
            - https://archive.org/download/win-metadata/WinMetadata.zip

- Download the `wine-tkg-affinity-fedorabuilt.tar.zst` custom runner
    - => https://github.com/daegalus/wine-tkg-affinity/releases
        - Using `Ark` or equivalent, unzip the file on the desktop and rename `wine-tkg-affinity-git-10.6.r0.g81425de3` to `wine-tkg-affinity`
        - Move it to the folder containing the other runners:
            - `~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/runners/wine-tkg-affinity/`

- Install Bottle from flatpak if you don't have it
    - Inside bottles/preferences/runners install the following runners :
        - `wine-ge-proton8-27-lol`
        - `caffe-9.7`

- Have the Affinity photo installer (other Affinity softs should work too) :
    - `Installer_affinity-photo-msi-2.6.3.exe`

C/ Bottle creation & configuration
1/ using `wine-ge-proton8-27-lol` runner

- Create a new bottle selecting the `wine-ge-proton8-27-lol` runner
    - Just install the following dependencies :
        - `allfonts`
        - `dotnet40` (will allow proper installation of `dotnet35` afterwards)

2/ Change the runner to `caffe-9.7`
    - Inside the bottle, change the runner to `caffe-9.7`.
    - Just install the following dependency :
        - `dotnet35sp1` (mandatory to be able to launch affinity installer)
            - An `Installation Error` error is displayed at the end and it still works.

    - Install `Installer_affinity-photo-msi-2.6.3.exe` via <button>Run executable...</button>
        - ** Create a desktop shortcut for this application** => No
            - Install with default settings then
                - If this error appears: You muse use "Turn Windows features on or off" : Just launch again the `Installer_affinity-photo-msi-2.6.3.exe` and repair, it will be good this time.

    - Set up the bottle with these parameters before launching Affinity for the first time:

        - Display
            - **Dedicated graphic map** => Yes

        - Parameters / Display / Advanced display settings
            - **Renderer** => Vulkan
            - Virtual Desktop** =>
                - **Activation** => Yes (Adds a wrap-around window but solves black RMB menu issues)
                - **Width** => 1660 (good for my screen)
                - **Height** => 1350

        - Settings -> Compatibility > Windows Version => Windows 10

        - **DXVK** => dxvk-2.6.1 *(important to enable it here)*
        - **VKD3D** => vkd3d-proton-2.14.1 *(important to enable here)*

        - Add the windows folder `WinMetadata` in the `system32` folder of the Bottles container:
            - `~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/<my_bottle-name>/drive_c/windows/system32/`
 

    - Install `vc_redist.x64.exe` from this link => https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170
        - Install it from bottle using <button>Run executable...</button>
            - (this one is required to export pngs from `affinity`)

    - Shut down all `bottle` processes:
        - ⏻ / Force all processes to stop

3/ Change the runner to `wine-ge-proton8-27-lol`

    - Change runner to `wine-ge-proton8-27-lol`.

    - Just install the following dependency :
        - `dotnet48` (dependency required to launch `Affinity`)

    - Cut all processes from the `bottle` :
        - ⏻ / Force all processes to stop

4/ Change the runner to `wine-tkg-affinity`

    - Change runner to `wine-ge-proton8-27-lol`.

    - Change runner to `wine-tkg-affinity` *(the only one that can run affinity correctly)*.
        - If `bottles` displays error popUps during the switch it's not an issue :
            - Kill and restart `Bottles`.

D/ Affinity Photo first launch

- Before launching `Affinity` :
    - Change the launch parameters for the `photo.exe` shortcut:
        - [Burger Menu] next to the shortcut / Change launch options
            - **Command Tools** => `--no-hw-ui`
                - **DXVK**=> Enable *(to prevent **flickering**)
                - **VKD3D** => Disable

- Launch Affinity (it should launch)
    - Double click the Affinity photo title-bar in order to fill the screen quickly

E/ Add a desktop icon

- If you don't have it, install flatseal from flatpak. It will help us to manage rights for bottles and its apps

- Inside flatseal, find bottles and in Filesystem / other files add the following paths :
    - xdg-data/applications  (Bottles shortcut folder)
    - /var/home/  (will allow you to save your Affinity Photo projects and exports into your /home folder)

- Back ou Bottle app inside bottles :
    - [Burger Menu] next to the shortcut / Add a desktop entry
        - The shortcut will be added here:
            - `~/.local/share/applications/`

F/ Persistent preferences inside Affinity Photo
- For now, Affinity Photo fails to create the preferences .xml files
- We have to generate them inside Windows OS :
    - Install the same version of Affinity Photo inside windows
        - Launch it and change the preferences as you want.
    - Get the relevant .xml files you changed. For me it was :
        - `%appdata%\Affinity\Photo\2.0\Settings\GeneralPreferences.xml`
        - `%appdata%\Affinity\Photo\2.0\Settings\ToolsPreferences.xml`
        - `%appdata%\Affinity\Photo\2.0\Settings\AssistantManager.xml`

- Back to Bazzite or your favorite linux OS :
    - Paste the .xml files into the `Settings` folder of your bottle :
    - `~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/<my_bottle-name>/drive_c/users/<my_user_name>/AppData/Roaming/Affinity/Photo/2.0/Settings`

G/ Known limitations
- You can't open an .afphoto from your file explorer (Dolphin...)
- Perfs are medium, maybe because we can't check "Hardware Acceleration" inside Affinity photo Settings
- Other than that it works pretty well

[TravisL]

A forum thread that is 37 pages long is not the most user accessible way to review bugs and possible solutions. Is it possible the OP could somehow make a .deb or flatpak or AppImage of the Linux version of Affinity to improve ease of installation or is that not possible because it isn't an "official" release (or some other reason)?

[Open Grafica]

4 hours ago, TravisL said:

Un thread di 37 pagine non è il modo più accessibile per gli utenti di esaminare bug e possibili soluzioni. È possibile che l'autore del post possa in qualche modo creare un file .deb, un flatpak o un'AppImage della versione Linux di Affinity per semplificarne l'installazione, oppure non è possibile perché non si tratta di una versione "ufficiale" (o per qualche altro motivo)?

It would be a great idea, I had thought about it but it seemed like too much to ask, but the positive thing about a 37-page thread is the interest from people, so I think, since I recognize that to do this there is a lot of work for those who have the skills necessary to do it, I think it is right to also incentivize it economically, I would be willing to make a donation if someone could create something useful to the community, there are many people interested in making the Affinity suite compatible with Linux, I am sure of it, I am the first after 30 years of Adobe and Apple now want to distance myself and feel freer, I am addressing those who started this discussion and the people who, following all these guides in these months, have tried to succeed in the intent, but like me have failed because they are not competent in the Linux field, would it be possible?

[Antibarbarus]

.deb packages aren’t really meant to be portable across all Linux distros, and I’m not sure how you would go about bundling Wine in a .deb, though I think it’s technically possible. Flatpak or AppImage should work much better and be compatible across most modern and up to date installs.

I’ve always found AppImage to be the easiest to work with and it would take a couple of minutes to get a functioning AppImage from a working Affinity setup on the same machine. User testing on different rigs, finding out what other libraries need to be bundled for snowflake systems, or maybe even building on an LTS system for broader compatibility, etc. is what takes the bulk of the time.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’m guessing that distributing such a package would be the most troublesome thing in this whole picture, as it is proprietary IP? Installing Linux and messing about with Affinity as an individual user with a product you paid for is one thing, but offering an alternative package of a piece of software is quite another. I haven’t looked in Serif’s ToS, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was something in there about that.

4 hours ago, TravisL said:

A forum thread that is 37 pages long is not the most user accessible way to review bugs and possible solutions.

Funny, with all the chatbot helpers, outsourced call centre operators, and gated communities in places like Discord, I find forums to be one of the last places on the web where you still have a chance to get some support. 😅

Jokes aside, Wine is a complex piece of software and there are so many variables with each individual system, that most things outside of personalised support (generalised advice, tips, tricks, etc.) are likely to fail. Containerised packages are a step forward in tackling that, but they aren’t a silver bullet. They are much larger because they bundle everything, and on top of that they’d still need to copy prefix files on disk while running Wine from within the sandbox, and with that overhead you’re sure to get some performance hit.

Edited June 2 by Antibarbarus
Edited for spelling

[marshmallow]

You cannot distribute affinity exes. My nix package (the closest thing I know of to a self contained .deb of affinity) requires you to manually download the installation files and provide them to the package. It should work on any Linux distro that has nix installed. https://github.com/mrshmllow/affinity-nix

[Daegalus]

I know how to make Affinity into a flatpak and have it working. The problem is it would be a bit inconvenient for many for multiple reasons:

 

1. WinMetadata can not be included, has to be downloaded on first run, due to distribution rights concerns with Microsoft. Not an issue per say, but makes the first run take a bit longer and would need some kind of visual letting the user know what s happening.

2. You can't include or pre-install the Affinty products. And not the installers either.

 

You would either need to make an App that you login and parse the website to get the installer only after a successful login. This is filled with edge cases and potential issues. Along with security issues. The other is to ask the user to place the installer in a folder th Flatpak has access to, and the flatpak runs it from there on first run.

 

This would be the same for AppImages, because it's not the technology that is stopping us, but legal and distribution rights.

[zioncommander]

Did someone managed to be able to run affinity with "Hardware Acceleration" ?
If yes can you share your config and how did you achieved this ? 😁

[TravisL]

Quote

Funny, with all the chatbot helpers, outsourced call centre operators, and gated communities in places like Discord, I find forums to be one of the last places on the web where you still have a chance to get some support. 😅

Oh of course! I love forums for this reason too, but my point was it would be easier to review people's individual issues / solutions if each new issue/solution was linked together like on a GitHub/Codeberg/GitLab bug issue tracker.

Quote

This would be the same for AppImages, because it's not the technology that is stopping us, but legal and distribution rights.

I had a feeling it would be something like this. Ah well, I can dream.

[3Dski7059]

I tried to use this process to run the installer for affinity-designer-msi-2.6.3.exe. There were volumes of "fixme" log entries. I did get to the point of being able to run the install application, but when I tried to run Designer, it attempted to communicate with other Affinity products and failed. I'm glad that others could run it, but this takes a lot of hacking for a program I don't use daily. I like the product when I need to create something, so I'm disappointed. I currently have a Windows 11 machine, but I'm trying to get off Windows, and it seems better to find software to replace Affinity Designer on Linux. I'm running Ubuntu 24.04. It looked like it might have something to do with the firewall, so I disabled it, and I still see various fixme messages with the same failure.

[JFIA]

17 hours ago, 3Dski7059 said:

I tried to use this process to run the installer for affinity-designer-msi-2.6.3.exe. There were volumes of "fixme" log entries. I did get to the point of being able to run the install application, but when I tried to run Designer, it attempted to communicate with other Affinity products and failed. I'm glad that others could run it, but this takes a lot of hacking for a program I don't use daily. I like the product when I need to create something, so I'm disappointed. I currently have a Windows 11 machine, but I'm trying to get off Windows, and it seems better to find software to replace Affinity Designer on Linux. I'm running Ubuntu 24.04. It looked like it might have something to do with the firewall, so I disabled it, and I still see various fixme messages with the same failure.

My experience with this error message is that I sometimes have a zombie instance of the app (or Wine itself) running after a crash. Try killing all of the app / Wine processes, or just reboot if you haven't and see if that fixes it?

[skeithmt]

I tried the recently updated script by Twig6943 for Lutris and that worked really well for me in CachyOS. I've learned to ignore the black screen stuttering when resizing the window because once you go full screen, everything seems to work nicely. Reminder for everyone that anybody with an AMD / Intel card will not be able to get Hardware Acceleration working, I'm on an AMD RX6800 so I admit I'm waiting for this  But thanks to all the devs involved in getting this to work 🙏 

I'm wondering if when we get Wine 10.X working with Affinity via ElementalWarrior's variant, if getting it to work with native Wayland might improve some of the window performance?

I like using Designer and Publisher for a bit of my solo work, nothing complicated, just nicely designed documents. Technically I could do them in Inkscape, but donno of a good publisher alternative unless I go Canva. But there's always something nice about your own software in your own machine 😉

I do have a question! I'm trying to get Affinity to recognise my fonts inside the software and I don't know how. In my OS I use "Fontbase" to manage the fonts I would like to import and organise but these don't show up in Affinity. I even tried copying the `.ttf` files inside the fonts folder inside the Wine folder butttttt nothing. So I'm wondering where all the fonts that get listed in Affinity are located such as "Noto" and "Open Sans". Thanks for the assist

Edited June 8 by skeithmt

[Daegalus]

1 hour ago, skeithmt said:

I like using Designer and Publisher for a bit of my solo work, nothing complicated, just nicely designed documents. Technically I could do them in Inkscape, but donno of a good publisher alternative unless I go Canva. But there's always something nice about your own software in your own machine 😉

I do have a question! I'm trying to get Affinity to recognise my fonts inside the software and I don't know how....

The most popular open source Publishing app is Scribus https://www.scribus.net

 

As for fonts, did you run `sudo fc-cache -fv` after copying then into the folders?

`~/.fonts`

`~/.local/share/fonts`

`<wine prefix>/drive_c/windows/Fonts`

These are the 3 places you can install fonts at the user level and prefix level.

[sunlite]

Hi Wanesty,

thanks a lot for this great tutorial. It perfectly works on my system "kubuntu 24 LTS" on a notebook (Vector 17 HX A13V with Intel On-Board graphics and RTX4090). There was just one little point I was struggling a little, but I got it fixed. When using the WinMetadata folder from my original Windows version, there was missing the file "Windows.Services.Store.StoreContract.winmd". At one point I was asked for exactly this "missing" file. I did not have the file in my WinMetadata folder because it is part of the Windows SDK (obviously I did not have the Windows SDK installed on my former system). So I started a virtual machine with Windows installed. Inside Windows I installed a Windows SDK: https://developer.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/sdk-archive/
(one SKD from the version between 10.0.19041 and 10.0.22621). Then I got the "missing" file and I could go on installing Affinity Suite v2 on my linux machine like described in the tutorial from Wanesty. 
As there are a lot of files being installed, the whole process of getting Affinity suite v2 running on my kubuntu took about 4 hours in total.

Since then I hard-tested these three tools (Photo, Designer and Publisher) ... I have never had a crash or an error. So ... For me and on my system it perfectly works.

Thanks again for that great tutorial. 
But ... I would really love to see a native version of Affinity Suite for Linux in the future

Best regards

Mike

 

Edited June 8 by sunlite

[skeithmt]

On 6/8/2025 at 10:58 AM, Daegalus said:

The most popular open source Publishing app is Scribus https://www.scribus.net

 

As for fonts, did you run `sudo fc-cache -fv` after copying then into the folders?

`~/.fonts`

`~/.local/share/fonts`

`<wine prefix>/drive_c/windows/Fonts`

These are the 3 places you can install fonts at the user level and prefix level.

That did the trick! Adding my fonts with Fontbase and then running `fc-cache` got my fonts to show in Affinity =D So the few things I do with Affinity I can now try doing them on Linux. Thanksssss

[Zode]

Has anyone else ran into the issue where tooltips are black boxes and tool selection (when you click and hold a tool like the brush) are a black box also when DXVK is enabled on the wineprefix?

[LouieT]

10 hours ago, Zode said:

Has anyone else ran into the issue where tooltips are black boxes and tool selection (when you click and hold a tool like the brush) are a black box also when DXVK is enabled on the wineprefix?

I haven't ran Affinity Photo in a while but last time I tried it, around 2 weeks ago, I also got this issue. It's kind of a deal-breaker for me, honestly, since I have to enable DXVK as it fixes a lot of other issues. I hope someone can fix this or pinpoint where the issue is.

Edited June 18 by LouieT

[bendangelo]

It looks like the latest version of Affinity Designer needs this:
 

Quote

rum affinity-photo3-wine9.13-part3 $HOME/.wineAffinity winetricks --unattended vcrun2022

 

[DonPIZI]

I deactivated DXVK in the launch options and it works as it should

Edited June 19 by DonPIZI

[ElementalWarrior]

Alright, lets see if I can make this a bit simpler.

I think in you should just be able to clone the dll from here:

https://github.com/ElementalWarrior/wine-wintypes.dll-for-affinity

and copy it to the application directory.

To make that even simpler, I'm trying to upstream a winetricks verb that both downloads Windows.winmd and wintypes.dll. 

https://github.com/ElementalWarrior/winetricks/tree/add-affinity

Install the application, clone this repo, and run `./src/winetricks affinity` from a fresh prefix, and see if it works.

After running this, you should be able to use bone stock wine (because apparently I was incorrect that you could do that before)

Note

My wintypes.dll does not include all the functionality the wine one does. But it doesn't appear to cause issue.

Note 2

This does not resolve the installer issues, but this change might, if they approve it.

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/8367

Note 3

Trying to make progress with open source contributions is kinda like herding cats. Angry angry cats.

[ElementalWarrior]

On 6/17/2025 at 10:34 PM, LouieT said:

I haven't ran Affinity Photo in a while but last time I tried it, around 2 weeks ago, I also got this issue. It's kind of a deal-breaker for me, honestly, since I have to enable DXVK as it fixes a lot of other issues. I hope someone can fix this or pinpoint where the issue is.

Try running with vulkan:
 

winetricks renderer=vulkan

or trying using wayland

winetricks graphics=wayland

Or some permutation of graphics/renderer (here are your options):

[james@jamestop ~]$ winetricks list-all  | grep -E "renderer|graphics"
Executing cd /sbin
graphics=default         Set graphics driver to default 
graphics=mac             Set graphics driver to Quartz (for macOS) 
graphics=wayland         Set graphics driver to Wayland 
graphics=x11             Set graphics driver to X11 
renderer=gdi             Set renderer to gdi 
renderer=gl              Set renderer to gl 
renderer=no3d            Set renderer to no3d 
renderer=vulkan          Set renderer to vulkan