Did not want to repeat an existing thread, but it is now closed but very relevant to this thread. Serif creators of the Affinity software suite became a Division of the Australian media software company Canva. If anyone is running the Windows version of Affinity, you will now get a pop-up that notifies you it is now free (version 3). This version is now available with two versions, a ‘standard’ user installer which uses .msix which means if still running windows 10 you need to update the MS App installer. However, you can also download the Enterprise version which is in .exe format which means it can now run on GNU/Linux using a combination of WINE and Lutris:
This is of great interest to me as I use my Zorin install for photo editing. I have never used affinity, mainly Gimp. But, I would like to try it. I would have preferred a linux version but, am happy to try it with wine. Do you have the link to the relevant download that I need?
You will need to supply an email address in order to download it. It combines 3 products into one interface, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher. A Zorin member who uses the Windows product for professional use has contacted Canva who intend to release a GNU/Linux version at some point. There are pitfalls in respect of the Vector element which you will see if you scroll down that forum link I gave you. You could always download PaintShop Pro 9 or 8 from the internet archive. That runs well in WINE, but I think you need to install WINE 32-bit dependencies. With PaintShop Pro I made a birthday card for a work colleague. Her pinup was Zinedine Zedane. I found a picture of him and his wife and I replaced his wife’s head with that of my colleague. She was well-impressed.
I had problems installing affinity on my Zorin 18 install. I used the instructions for installing Lutris first. Lutris flatpak came up saying that it was unsupported but, I tried it anyway. And I also tried Lutris from the Zorin repository. In both cases, when I ran them for the first time, they were not downloading the initial set up files. And installing Wine, without Lutris failed but, I expected that. Is there another way
The youtuber mentioned something about scripts in the description under the video. Did you use those? I have a lot on at the moment getting rid of old 3.5” floppy discs and removing all the metal parts for scrap metal recycling and generally getting rid of old stuff. Selling off my old Amiga A1500 and Amiga CD32. I think I might as well look at selling some old PC Games I never got round to playing as I’ve moved to PS4 for limited gaming. Also, having been busy with the Unofficial Manual that still needs polishing, I have not got round to doing the updated contents. I am also currently Beta Testing SoftMaker Office 2026/NX. I have tested how it copes with translating the Zorin 17 manual into German and that needs some changes and just doing that used up the built-in DeepL allowance. If I want to do any more I shall have to use Google Docs or see if I can use the FreeLibre software that the Zorin Forum uses.
I downloaded a script which was meant to be installed in Lutris after Lutris was fully installed. But, I didn’t reach that point in the process because Lutris seemed unable when I first ran it, to download it’s files that it needed. I waited quite a long time for these files to download before giving up.
Thanks for the link. I know a Zorin member posted about this but can’t remember if they posted a link. What Canva is trying to do is get income from its A.I. side of Art Creation.
Looked at the post on Zorin forum again and they did post that link you gave.
@linux_fangirl I tried to install on Zorin 17 last night, no joy. It did not even run the mono installer like it did in his video. Zorin complained about dotnet 3.5 having been disabled so installed that and its service pack via Synaptic Package Manager, no joy. In addition to the Affinity .exe Lutris also pointed to a non-existent “WinMetapackage” from archive.org.
I then tried on WattOS-R13 which is based on Debian but winetricks is not in its repo and would not allow me to run an install via third party repository. Whilst this might be a good measure of security to protect the OS, I can’t help but feel external issues being placed on GNU/Linux. It is only recently that it has come to light OpenBSD had been fitted with backdoors requested by the FBI which came to light after an NDA expired on one of the Developers charged with adding the backdoors. On a thread about this on the FreeBSD forum it was mentions that SELinux was written by the NSA! Looking at that video on YouTube it was telling that:
a) they were running Debian, and
b) they were running the flatpack version of Lutris in KDE Plasma.
So I will wait until hopefully Canvas will produce a .deb package. In the meantime I can recommend PaintShop Pro 8 from archive.org which just needs wine. It is what I used in my last job of 19 years:
[Side note: Again the default browser for /e/OS has started its sporadic rejection of pasting links from another page in the browser. Had to save the edit to this thread and complete the post in SR Iron browser for Android. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!)
Thanks for trying this too. I wasn’t really sure if I had done something wrong. I will just wait until a Linux deb become available. I didn’t need this software but, was just interested to try it as it seems to have a good reputation.
I have successfully been running my V2 license on Mint using the older Elemental Warrior instructions described on their forums. That involved manually compiling Wine with a patch though, and getting the .NET runtime to install properly was a bit of a bumpy road. Things now seem easier.
Path overlays are off and settings don’t save, but those are known issues. Otherwise it seems to work fine.
So for those who need Affinity, I can recommend Mint. DaVinci Resolve is also running well.
You can likely just copy those metadata files from any Windows 10/11 installation. Worked for my V2 install.
I don’t really use Windows any more. I do have an ancient laptop running Windows 10, ‘just in case’ but, I doubt if it will be a good enough spec for affinity to install on - it is around 15 years old, maybe older. So, if there was a different way, I would be interested to know. My laptop that I attempted to install affinity on is Mint LMDE.
You just need the metadata files from a Windows installation to copy to your Wine folder. They are part of Windows, not Affinity, so no need to install Affinity on the Windows system. But they have been uploaded to several places, including various Github repositories since for users without a Windows system at hand.
So if the script swarfendor437 has been using relies on an archive.org link that is down, those files can be obtained through other means.
If I go to archive.org it shows nothing in search but it appeared to install 550 kB of something. It appeared after I selected the affinity.exe in the Install dialogue box below affinity.exe. Perhaps it is a private link.
