affinity crimes

This repo makes Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer work on Linux, far better than they have any right to do, but with some known issues.

It is generally good enough that you can happily do art on Linux, albeit with some limited set of known warts.

Based on: https://codeberg.org/Wanesty/affinity-wine-docs

Known issues

Can't reattach panels to the app window: https://codeberg.org/wanesty/affinity-wine-docs/issues/12
Settings saving across restarts is broken: https://codeberg.org/wanesty/affinity-wine-docs/issues/11
Exporting PNGs works properly but breaks/crashes the app afterwards: https://codeberg.org/wanesty/affinity-wine-docs/issues/10

SVG works fine.
Possible occasional crashes of unknown cause? I can't remember. Consider hitting the save button frequently as one should do in these things anyway.

Howto

nix build .#env -o wine

Copy C:\Windows\System32\WinMetadata from a Windows computer to license_violations/WinMetadata.

./setup.sh

Install it

./affinity.sh wine ./affinity-designer-msi-2.3.0.exe

Run it

./affinity.sh wine ~/.local/share/wineAffinity/drive_c/Program\ Files/Affinity/Designer\ 2/Designer.exe

Fixes

Graphics backend

You will undoubtedly benefit from setting the graphics backend, which probably fixes flickering. I have found that on KDE Wayland on AMD, Vulkan doesn't flicker but is a little bit laggy. On KDE Wayland on Intel, GL works properly without flickering or much lag.

Run:

./affinity.sh winetricks renderer=vulkan
# or
./affinity.sh winetricks renderer=gl

Note that you will need to use NixGL on non-NixOS hosts or else Affinity will hang, for lack of successfully loading a graphics driver. Also, you have to use the correct one, either nixGL or nixVulkan depending on your graphics backend. If only someone wrote a nixYuri of both of them.

Specifically, use nixYuri ./affinity.sh [...].

Font rendering

Consider running:

./affinity.sh winecfg

and setting the DPI higher than 96. This will turn on font smoothing as well.

Be aware that it might still look like ~~shit~~ a macOS computer, because there is no subpixel antialiasing. If you want that, ./affinity.sh winetricks fontsmooth=rgb (or fontsmooth=gray to revert to the grayscale font smoothing).