Affinity Suite v2.0.4 on linux [ Wine ]

[Snapseed]

1 hour ago, Wanesty said:

ahah no,

exporting to anything but vector format crashes all three affinity software, save, export, and if it stays stuck on a frozen state, kill wine with the command listed on the tips and fixes page

it's kind of a pain ngl but as i said a few times, i sadly can not recommend using affinity on linux if you're using the affinity suite intensely, for professal work purposes.
it is usable for most of it's usecases, but far from flawless..

Currently, the only way I know of getting Affinity Photo to really work well on Linux is to use a Windows or macOS/Sosumi virtual machine on Linux (there are loads of guides online on how to do this).

I wish it were otherwise, but Serif Europe have made it all too clear that they are not going to bother with Linux although they are thankfully fine with us discussing how to try to get Affinity Photo to work on Linux.

[ElementalWarrior]

8 hours ago, Ennea said:

First off, a big thanks to Wanesty for the guide and ElementalWarrior for all the work and patches that made this possible in the first place. I've set this up the other day and it's working quite nicely. One thing I've ran into: Affinity Photo 2 does not appear to be able to save its preferences/settings at all. It does remember my login, but nothing else. Any preferences I change in the preferences dialog, or even the checkbox in the "new document" popup to prevent it from opening on every start simply does not save.

Has anybody else had this problem yet? I could not find anything in this thread here. Photo is also not crashing, at least it doesn't look like it is. So I'm really not sure what could be causing this.

 

Edit: Looks like Photo can at least read the config files. I've generated them in a Windows VM and copied them over. But writing appears to not work. Well, this approach is an acceptable solution for me, at least for the time being

Look for logs in the terminal that have to do with writing to file and the term "fixme" or "stub". The function is probably not implemented in wine

[Sorn]

I work professionally doing CGI and Linux workstations can be tailored to user needs and even workflows and kept stable and sane. That's a productivity boost. I don't care that much if it's free or not, we have budgets, but the most expensive to us is losing work hours because the system updates, changes in different machines causes issues... there are many things that get out of wack in Windows we can't easily afford.

Mac products have that somewhat sorted by limiting hardware and tailoring the experience and configuration possible to make it manageable. And colour management it's reasonable and, most importantly, fixed for almost all macs. For a heavy 3D production environment Macs are not really a choice due to some hardware limitations.

That is why I so wish we had Affinity software for Linux. In some scenarios is really a great bonus to have it right there, instead of dedicating workstations just for that use, either windows or mac machines. Dual boot sometimes doesn't solve the issue at all and presents other challenges.

I thank all of you for taking the time to test and evolve the solutions presented here, hopefully until we find a way to actually work with Affinity software in Linux, be it native or with WINE. It's really appreciated and some of the less Linux tech savvy part of the community truly hopes you succeed. Thanks.

[Wanesty]

12 hours ago, Snapseed said:

Currently, the only way I know of getting Affinity Photo to really work well on Linux is to use a Windows or macOS/Sosumi virtual machine on Linux

imo this isn't really a solution, getting it working correctly and smoothly enough for professional use requires your to have two gpu (or use vmware's emulated gpu driver idk how good it is but i heard nice things)...

10 hours ago, Sorn said:

Dual boot sometimes doesn't solve the issue at all and presents other challenges

just don't bother and stick to windows/macOS, imo if you have to start an os(vm) or worse, loose your current flow of work by rebooting your machine just is not worth the trouble
(like i much prefer the software crashing randomly than having to babysit two os with my settings etc)

 

anyway, thank you @Sorn for your professional insight of your situation with the affinity products :)

[Snapseed]

On 9/16/2023 at 5:49 AM, Wanesty said:

imo this isn't really a solution, getting it working correctly and smoothly enough for professional use requires your to have two gpu (or use vmware's emulated gpu driver idk how good it is but i heard nice things)...

just don't bother and stick to windows/macOS, imo if you have to start an os(vm) or worse, loose your current flow of work by rebooting your machine just is not worth the trouble
(like i much prefer the software crashing randomly than having to babysit two os with my settings etc)

 

anyway, thank you @Sorn for your professional insight of your situation with the affinity products :)

I do fully agree with you, and you need to have a high specification computer to use VMs and to get good results.

I do know that staff over at CodeWeavers were open to cooperation so as to get Affinity Photo, etc. to work well with CrossOver but that openness was not reciprocated by the other necessary party.

[Snapseed]

On 9/15/2023 at 7:30 PM, Sorn said:

I work professionally doing CGI and Linux workstations can be tailored to user needs and even workflows and kept stable and sane. That's a productivity boost. I don't care that much if it's free or not, we have budgets, but the most expensive to us is losing work hours because the system updates, changes in different machines causes issues... there are many things that get out of wack in Windows we can't easily afford.

Mac products have that somewhat sorted by limiting hardware and tailoring the experience and configuration possible to make it manageable. And colour management it's reasonable and, most importantly, fixed for almost all macs. For a heavy 3D production environment Macs are not really a choice due to some hardware limitations.

That is why I so wish we had Affinity software for Linux. In some scenarios is really a great bonus to have it right there, instead of dedicating workstations just for that use, either windows or mac machines. Dual boot sometimes doesn't solve the issue at all and presents other challenges.

I thank all of you for taking the time to test and evolve the solutions presented here, hopefully until we find a way to actually work with Affinity software in Linux, be it native or with WINE. It's really appreciated and some of the less Linux tech savvy part of the community truly hopes you succeed. Thanks.

This is what gets me. The special effects industry is huge and wealthy and yet the companies concerned seemingly cannot find any funds to pay developers to turn Cinepaint, Gimp, etc. into the highly professional competent products that they need to be.

[Wanesty]

anyone experiencing saving issues with the experimental WoW64 compile ? (as reported in an issue)

[azuredusk10]

On 9/15/2023 at 10:43 AM, Ennea said:

First off, a big thanks to Wanesty for the guide and ElementalWarrior for all the work and patches that made this possible in the first place. I've set this up the other day and it's working quite nicely. One thing I've ran into: Affinity Photo 2 does not appear to be able to save its preferences/settings at all. It does remember my login, but nothing else. Any preferences I change in the preferences dialog, or even the checkbox in the "new document" popup to prevent it from opening on every start simply does not save.

Has anybody else had this problem yet? I could not find anything in this thread here. Photo is also not crashing, at least it doesn't look like it is. So I'm really not sure what could be causing this.

 

Edit: Looks like Photo can at least read the config files. I've generated them in a Windows VM and copied them over. But writing appears to not work. Well, this approach is an acceptable solution for me, at least for the time being

I've also noticed this. I use Affinity Designer 2 with snapping on and align to pixel grid on. However, I have to turn these two settings on every time I open the app. The app doesn't remember these settings' last state. The option to stop showing the welcome dialog at startup also doesn't persist. If the app can't write to the config files then that could explain this behaviour.

Going to File > Exit didn't solve the problem for me. Nor did adding a new Studio preset.

It's also not a big deal for me.

[Wanesty]

23 hours ago, Wanesty said:

anyone experiencing saving issues with the experimental WoW64 compile ? (as reported in an issue)

my own followup:
> okay... i just noticed but like, they did save but on my desktop ??? (not the folder i selected)

 

10 hours ago, azuredusk10 said:

The option to stop showing the welcome dialog at startup also doesn't persist. If the app can't write to the config files then that could explain this behaviour.

Going to File > Exit didn't solve the problem for me. Nor did adding a new Studio preset.

It's also not a big deal for me.

mmh.. it's pretty bad then if the only fix is making a config file in a vm :/

[ShadeOn]

On 9/18/2023 at 5:29 PM, Snapseed said:

I do fully agree with you, and you need to have a high specification computer to use VMs and to get good results.

I do know that staff over at CodeWeavers were open to cooperation so as to get Affinity Photo, etc. to work well with CrossOver but that openness was not reciprocated by the other necessary party.

I might not speak on CodeWeavers behalf, as I just translate from EN to RO part of the app, but I do the beta testing for new versions also.

Be sure that almost every time I test the Affinity Suite v2 in a advanced user way (but still as newbie) (click click, setting up environment, no library installs etc cause I don't know those stuff) when a beta is up, and if I see any progress done, I will give a small "update and Hurray" on this forum where the discussion is continued.

Currently it isn't even showing a .exe part after install, just like some other apps that I test.

But... surprisingly v23 (with Wine 8.x) has made huge progress on Guild Wars 2, made it almost lag free even in big battles (20vs20) with only integrated graphics card, no dedicated one, so yeah.. it's a big thing alright...

But we all must know that those from Valve with their steam games app (arguably.. cause even software works now there, and can't be said it's a games app "only") and their Proton made this possible, as they mostly contribute to the development of Wine nowadays by a fair margin.

But what I can say for sure is that.. CodeWeavers are dedicated on making porting apps and games possible on Linux so we skip the dual boot or VM variants, but the priority development and updates of Wine is given to those companies that give a funding (it doesn't need to be every month, it can be even yearly or whenever they see bugs and want to be fixed asap) for keeping their apps/games working. (or after a initial funding and the app works, the company with the funded app can dedicate a developer for the Wine part to keep their apps in check, and then they don't need to give funding afterwards, as far as I know at least).

And of course, apps that weren't funded in any way, are "tried" by us, aka users to see if any progress made on other apps, helped the non-funded app to progress forward also (as most might have same library in common)

Only after this, when they got available time to dedicate to something else, they check that list where we voted which ones we want to see it ported, and they check what libraries mostly in the list have in common

 

And while we are on the topic.. yes, I have a dream that if Affinity or Gimp doesn't progress further (Gimp 3 seems to be interesting when they'll let it on the market) , I would like someone with courage and intuition from the Blender development to step forward and start a funding for a app or a series of apps that give raster and vector capabilities and can complete each other .

I know Photoline exists, but it's UI needs to be updated and make some tabs separate for raster and vector, not all in same area like in Photoshop...

But even Blender team some time ago acknowledged Affinity Suite and given a thumbs up to have courage to become a default icon on Linux as a "go-to" for raster and vector editors (and this can translate in giving a idea option for other OS users to make a workflow on their system as well).

But same as Blender and CodeWeavers... the ball is on Serif's side to decide how to handle the SWOT table in the unforeseen future. (or just stay relaxed and let us try and try and try (15 years later....) the app to work under Wine if enough development was made from Wine developers side for free )

[TheMightyFozz]

I was a Designer user until i switched to Linux because of Microsoft's stupid restrictions on upgrading to Windows 11. I am commenting here so Serif knows there is a market for Linux port's of their software.

[Snapseed]

23 hours ago, ShadeOn said:

I might not speak on CodeWeavers behalf, as I just translate from EN to RO part of the app, but I do the beta testing for new versions also.

Be sure that almost every time I test the Affinity Suite v2 in a advanced user way (but still as newbie) (click click, setting up environment, no library installs etc cause I don't know those stuff) when a beta is up, and if I see any progress done, I will give a small "update and Hurray" on this forum where the discussion is continued.

Currently it isn't even showing a .exe part after install, just like some other apps that I test.

But... surprisingly v23 (with Wine 8.x) has made huge progress on Guild Wars 2, made it almost lag free even in big battles (20vs20) with only integrated graphics card, no dedicated one, so yeah.. it's a big thing alright...

But we all must know that those from Valve with their steam games app (arguably.. cause even software works now there, and can't be said it's a games app "only") and their Proton made this possible, as they mostly contribute to the development of Wine nowadays by a fair margin.

But what I can say for sure is that.. CodeWeavers are dedicated on making porting apps and games possible on Linux so we skip the dual boot or VM variants, but the priority development and updates of Wine is given to those companies that give a funding (it doesn't need to be every month, it can be even yearly or whenever they see bugs and want to be fixed asap) for keeping their apps/games working. (or after a initial funding and the app works, the company with the funded app can dedicate a developer for the Wine part to keep their apps in check, and then they don't need to give funding afterwards, as far as I know at least).

And of course, apps that weren't funded in any way, are "tried" by us, aka users to see if any progress made on other apps, helped the non-funded app to progress forward also (as most might have same library in common)

Only after this, when they got available time to dedicate to something else, they check that list where we voted which ones we want to see it ported, and they check what libraries mostly in the list have in common

 

And while we are on the topic.. yes, I have a dream that if Affinity or Gimp doesn't progress further (Gimp 3 seems to be interesting when they'll let it on the market) , I would like someone with courage and intuition from the Blender development to step forward and start a funding for a app or a series of apps that give raster and vector capabilities and can complete each other .

I know Photoline exists, but it's UI needs to be updated and make some tabs separate for raster and vector, not all in same area like in Photoshop...

But even Blender team some time ago acknowledged Affinity Suite and given a thumbs up to have courage to become a default icon on Linux as a "go-to" for raster and vector editors (and this can translate in giving a idea option for other OS users to make a workflow on their system as well).

But same as Blender and CodeWeavers... the ball is on Serif's side to decide how to handle the SWOT table in the unforeseen future. (or just stay relaxed and let us try and try and try (15 years later....) the app to work under Wine if enough development was made from Wine developers side for free )

There was a very helpful Serif Europe member of staff who really did try and assist in the efforts to get Affinity Photo to work well with Wine but he left the company a year or so ago. Since then, it's been nothing and so all we can now do here is share our helpful tips and updates to try to get things to work.

Their understandable main priority in recent years has been to ensure that the Affinity range of software products works well on Apple Silicon M1 and M2 chip sets.

[Loren Dias]

Commenting on using graphic software on a Virtual Machine, I ran 2 graphics cards with VFIO years ago -- you have to install a kernel that has the features you need -- I prefer IBM/RedHat VMM (VirtualMachineManager) -- arch wiki has some good articles on it.

Yes you __can__ get a decent experience -- VMWare specifically has something called "Unity Mode" where the VM window will act like a regular window on the Linux Workstation desktop.

All in all, the process wasn't particularly worth it, I could just as easily have a low power laptop I leave always on in my LAN Network Closet and simply do all my edits via NoMachine or other remote lan desktop (I've done this too).

These days I do neither. I use a combination of open tooling and am always keeping an eye out for more.

There is a space in the Linux Market for a good graphics tool -- from the StackOverflow annual statistics it shows a large percentage of professionals prefer or exclusively use Linux as I do now. I don't think that gap will be there forever, if you follow the git status and patches and the developer social accounts it sounds like the GNU Image Manipulation Program is very close to 3.0 (Possibly end of year) which has a completely new UI and CMYK. As someone with 20 years in graphics and coming from Photoshop and fumbling my way through their development builds I believe that 3.0 will be akin to the Blender 2.7 release. And after seeing the funding of Thunderbird 3M, Blender 1.2M, Inkscape, Krita, and recently 100k per game engine (GoDot, FNA, etc...) this week I am sure once minimum viability is reached in the professional space the pace will quicken.

I think there is space for commercial offerings aswell in the Linux Space as the greater desktop market retracts and more casual computer users exclusively use tablets and phones and professionals are drawn to Linux for superior capabilities -- hourly filesystem snapshotting to protect work for example, faster IO, better offsite backups, a more controlled interface and better resource efficiency and performance via MESA than other platforms, etc...

Anyways, I think these threads are proof of interest, and at least for me as long as it works in wine I am willing to keep buying a license and keep this thing in my tool belt. As others have noted other professional sectors -- 3D, Video Editing, Audio have all made their way to the platform to anyone who has been paying attention -- I fully expect image editing will as well either by way of wine or directly.

[Wanesty]

On 9/21/2023 at 3:56 PM, Snapseed said:

Their understandable main priority in recent years has been to ensure that the Affinity range of software products works well on Apple Silicon M1 and M2 chip sets.

funny how quickly it got updated for ARM btw ^^  (...)

[ElementalWarrior]

21 minutes ago, Wanesty said:

funny how quickly it got updated for ARM btw ^^  (...)

Rebuilding for a different instruction set is trivial compared to changing your 3M line of code software to use an entirely different set of window, filesystem, keychain, network, etc libraries.

Drop the criticism of Serif on this thread.

They don't "simply" support Linux for the same reason not everyone here is debugging, patching and upstreaming wine code. It is time consuming, not straightforward, and requires expertise.

The more people rag on Linux support on serifs own forum, the more likely they will be to just lock every thread talking about Linux.

[Grunt]

People on this forum are obviously forgetting one very crucial thing:

GNU/Linux is open-source software, while entire Affinity suite is strictly proprietary. After all these years I remember few proprietary project on Linux. If i count out NVIDIA GPU drivers, they ended up pretty much the same. Hostile operating environment I guess. 😁

But I have to give a point to @Wanesty. The criticism is at least factual.

So, for staying on the topic this evening:

Three weeks ago, there was merge request/commit in mainline Wine tree - apisetschema: Add ext-ms-win-dxcore-l1-1-0.

Quote

Needed by Affinity Photo.

The headers are needed for MinGW.

In current situation there is not possible to use ElementalWarrior's dxcore patch. Are there any information what might be next in future? Shouldn't be effort focused rather in this direction?

[Wanesty]

2 hours ago, ElementalWarrior said:

Rebuilding for a different instruction set is trivial compared to changing your 3M line of code software to use an entirely different set of window, filesystem, keychain, network, etc libraries.

i believe the windows and the MacOS code differs a bit so i don't know if it relies as much on dotnet stuff on the latter, anyway, yes building for arm is easier than a full port.

With that said i would assume that porting to ARM and thus having to use a more limited instruction set had some meaningful impact and probably required some rewrite to get x86-64 specific optimization running on ARM (supposition, i don't know how low level Affinity is but that's the reasoning behind my troll-ish remark).

 

1 hour ago, Grunt said:

GNU/Linux is open-source software, while entire Affinity suite is strictly proprietary. After all these years I remember few proprietary project on Linux. If i count out NVIDIA GPU drivers, they ended up pretty much the same. Hostile operating environment I guess.

from the top of my head i can list: Bitwig, DaVinci Resolve (which started on linux btw), VMware, Red Hat stuff, Discord, Spotify, Steam, Sublime Text, JetBrains IDEs, amd's own gpu drivers (AMDGPU-PRO)

however yes, having to maintain for multiple distro is very time consuming, and that's why DaVinci Resolve sticked to only officially supporting openSUSE,
but now flatpak exist ! And it makes it way easier for both small project and big commercial software like Bitwig(flatpak mention) !

:)

1 hour ago, Grunt said:

In current situation there is not possible to use ElementalWarrior's dxcore patch. Are there any information what might be next in future? Shouldn't be effort focused rather in this direction?

i haven't looked into it but if it got pushed in main wine, removing the dxcore related stuff in ElementalWarrior's fork .patch files should probably do the trick ?

OMG ALSO !!

this means that pre-winmetadata-requiered version like the 1.10.4 (or 1.10.3 i forgor) SHOULD RUN ON LINUX WITH DEFAULT WINE !!!

 

 

EDIT :

Quote

and that's why DaVinci Resolve sticked to only officially supporting openSUSE

my point here was that even tho Resolve is only on officially supported on openSUSE, it has been "ported" to other distro and maintaned by the community,
so yes since most of the OS is open source/libre, having to rely on companies to fix stuff instead of being able to do it ourself is what makes most linux users hate proprietary software.
("fix stuff" : for example the fact that most proprietary soft (including nvidia drivers) took ages to get compatible with Wayland (or still aren't))

however it can be done right : Steam very actively rewrote a ton of stuff like hardware acceleration and the general UI framework for all three distributed version mostly because they wanted to improve the linux app ! for the steamdeck

 

Also mandatory mention of Unreal Engine that is proprietary but with publicly available source code

Edited September 23 by Wanesty
edit part

[Snapseed]

On 9/23/2023 at 7:09 PM, ElementalWarrior said:

Rebuilding for a different instruction set is trivial compared to changing your 3M line of code software to use an entirely different set of window, filesystem, keychain, network, etc libraries.

Drop the criticism of Serif on this thread.

They don't "simply" support Linux for the same reason not everyone here is debugging, patching and upstreaming wine code. It is time consuming, not straightforward, and requires expertise.

The more people rag on Linux support on serifs own forum, the more likely they will be to just lock every thread talking about Linux.

Just for the record, I would like to confirm and state my gratitude and thanks to all the good staff at Serif Affinity for allowing this, and other similar discussions, to continue because they are very helpful in terms of trying to get the rather good range of Affinity products to work well on Linux

I would also like to confirm that I do recommend the use of the Affinity range of products to Windows and macOS users (including on other tech forums) as they are great alternatives to the expensive permanent subscription model that is offered by a certain large competitor corporation.

Indeed, professional photographer Joe Cristina fully recommends Affinity Photo in his Cutting the Cord series of videos that are still available over on Youtube.