Software

Affinity on Linux

Just a quick thank you to some Affinity community folks for getting the suite somewhat functional on Linux.

Alex Ward

Mar 7, 2025 • 3 min read

😈

Update (11/26/25): There's a new way to do this with Lutris that works great: https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux. I've run this script on a few machines now, and it works as well as the old method.

I just wanted to do a quick shout-out post to something that has been immensely helpful as I move to eliminate Windows and (to a lesser extent) Apple products from my life.

A bit of background, I've lost a lot of trust in big tech during the "AI revolution" they keep shoving onto everyone whether they like it or not. In particular, Windows has become adware / spyware (by showing full page ads and including recall, an ill-conceived idea) and Apple has decided to force enable Apple Intelligence in recent updates.

For more on that, read here:

Anyhow, one thing that's been keeping me at least partially using Apple systems past that was that the Affinity Suite only works on Mac and getting it running on Linux has been a beast.

😈

I'm going to use screen names for the most part here.

The long story short about how this miracle came to be is that ElementalWarrior (James McDonnell) made a bunch of modifications to Wine in order to get the Affinity suite working. He posted on the Affinity forums about making this work here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/166159-affinity-photo-running-on-linux-with-bottles/page/3/#comment-1059150

Then, Wanesty (Liz) wrote up a guide in said forums with instructions on how to get this working: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/166159-affinity-photo-running-on-linux-with-bottles/page/3/#comment-1059150

Finally, that brings us to why we're here today, as Wanesty has also made a website that explains the process:

It took until the website for me to finally make the attempt, as I couldn't follow the discussion in the original thread where ElementalWarrior got Wine working until Wanesty wrote it all down in an easy-to-understand way on that site.

This has saved me from having to switch over to the Mac every time I need to do something in Designer or Publisher.

Is it perfect? Not by any stretch. Performance could be better, and I get the occasional crash (which …also happens on Mac). But it's possible. And it's saved me a bunch of time.

If this is something that helps you too, you can toss a few dollars at ElementalWarrior at their Buy me a Coffee link (which I pulled from the forum):

Wanesty doesn't have a public donation link that I could find, but I'll update this post if that changes.