Using Windows installation files for Affinity apps on Linux

[brezanac]

I've been trying for quite some time to make Affinity apps run on Linux, without much success.

As promissing as all the suggestions I've found were, eventually they all ended up as failures.

Then a couple of days ago, for whatever reason, I came up with the idea to simply copy the entire Affinity installation folder from my Windows machine to a CrossOver installation on my Linux Mint machine.

Lo and behold, to my absolute surprise, both apps were able to not just start, but also properly activate and run without any issues whatsoever.

If anyone is interested, both Designer and Photo are version 1.10.6, running on CrossOver for Linux v23.6, which again runs Wine v8.0.1 in the background along with the preinstalled .NET Framework 4.7.2 inside a CrossOver bottle.

My question is simple.

Am I allowed to run and use Affinity apps like this?

Affinity doesn't install on CrossOver at all because of the cursed .NET Framework 3.5 but apparently it works fine when the Windows installations are just copied inside CrossOver.

EDIT: I understand that this section is intended for Windows and MacOS but I really didn't know where else to post my question.

[Callum]

Hi Brezanac,

I'm not familiar with Cross Over but I can't think of any reasons we wouldn't allow running the apps this way please note however we won't accept any bug reports etc that can only be replicated on a none supported operating system.

Thanks
C

[brezanac]

3 hours ago, Callum said:

Hi Brezanac,

I'm not familiar with Cross Over but I can't think of any reasons we wouldn't allow running the apps this way please note however we won't accept any bug reports etc that can only be replicated on a none supported operating system.

Thanks
C

Hello Callum.

Thank you for your response.

Crossover is a commercial version of Wine, a compatibility layer software for Linux, MacOS etc. which is used for running Windows software on those platforms.

As for support I am perfectly aware that I can't expect any in my case and I am perfectly fine with that.

I am just glad that I can finally use Affinity apps on Linux.

Live long and prosper 🖖

[Polemarch]

@brezanac, I owe you my thanks. Registered here just to say that.

 

I had tried the Wanesty/ElementalWarrior guide for compiling a patched version of Wine, but ultimately gave up. It just didn't appear to be able to launch the installer on Ubuntu 24.04 - I'm sure it was a trivial wine issue but the logs yielded nothing of value.

Allow me to give future readers more information on the steps that I did to get all Affinity Apps (v 1.10.6) running on Ubuntu Linux 24.04. I haven't tried the latest v2, so that might be a useful add-on if somebody cares to try.

I created a new / blank Windows 10 64-bit Bottle in crossover (I guess you could go vanilla bottles, but then installing .Net would be a bit harder). In this bottle I went "install application into bottle" and searched for "4.7.2" to install the .Net-Framework in said version. One of the first files somehow couldn't be fetched (503 error despite loading the ~50MB) but I managed to manually download it, point the installer to it's location and then it went through.

On my Win10 computer I just zipped all 4 folder (Publisher, Designer, Photo and Common) in C:\Program Files\Affinity and unpacked them in the same location inside my bottle (you can open the folder from within crossover or navigate to your_home_folder/.cxoffice/your_bottle_name.

After this it was just a matter of clicking 'run command' and browsing to the respective .exe and then creating a launcher.

After some usage of Affinity Designer I can say that the experience is not 100% (i.e. Splash Screens are glitchy, 'About' window doesn't open) but the functionality is 100%, including the integration with native OS & Gnome functionality. I can drag PNG files onto my canvas from Nautilus, key shortcuts work and the application feels almost native and snappy. For the record, this is on a Lenovo X1C6 with i7-8550U, integrated Graphics, 16GB RAM and a Samsung 980 Pro. By no means a performance monster.