Installation and Usage Guide for Serif's Affinity Graphics Suite on Linux using ElementalWarrior's Wine fork.

^{Originally posted on the Affinity forum,
This repository exists due to the limitations of said forum, as I am unable to update the original guide i made there.}

This guide aims to provide step-by-step instructions for compiling Wine and running any Affinity software directly on your Linux pc.

Affinity Publisher running on ArchLinux - all right reserved artwork ^{This artwork was made entirely in Affinity Publisher and Photo, both running on my Linux desktop, which you can see the specs of in the running terminal thanks to neofetch}

Table of contents

• Preamble
• Compiling Wine
• Setting up your build and your wineprefix
• see also

Preamble

• Instead of installing Wine system-wide, we will be using "rum" to manage your Wine builds without interfering with the one packaged by your distribution.
  _{why rum and how to use bottles instead is described in the Q&A}

• Affinity softwares version 1.10.4 and later releases require .winmd files from an existing Windows 10+ install.

• $HOME/ may need to be replaced by your full home directory path /home/USERNAME/ in order to make it absolute.
  _{this is a common issue with non-posix complient shells like nushell}

Dependencies

To compile Wine, you will need to get the following build dependencies.

^{The following is a simplified version of the dependencies listed in Wine's documentation.}

• Arch^linux and Pacman distro:

pacman -Syu alsa-lib alsa-plugins cups desktop-file-utils dosbox ffmpeg fontconfig freetype2 gcc-libs gettext giflib gnutls gst-plugins-base-libs gtk3 libgphoto2 libpcap libpulse libva libxcomposite libxcursor libxi libxinerama libxrandr mingw-w64-gcc opencl-headers opencl-icd-loader samba sane sdl2 v4l-utils vulkan-icd-loader wine-mono

• Ubuntu, Debian and apt-get distro:

apt install gcc-mingw-w64 gcc-multilib libasound2-dev libcups2-dev libdbus-1-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype-dev libgl-dev libgnutls28-dev libgphoto2-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libosmesa6-dev libpcap-dev libpulse-dev libsane-dev libsdl2-dev libudev-dev libunwind-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev libvulkan-dev libx11-dev libxcomposite-dev libxcursor-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libxi-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev ocl-icd-opencl-dev samba-dev

• Fedora and DNF distro:

dnf install alsa-lib-devel cups-devel dbus-libs fontconfig-devel freetype-devel glibc-devel.i686 gnutls-devel gstreamer1-devel gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel libgphoto2-devel libunwind-devel libusbx-devel libX11-devel libXcomposite-devel libXcursor-devel libXext-devel libXfixes-devel libXi-devel libXrandr-devel libXrender-devel mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libOSMesa-devel mingw32-gcc mingw64-gcc ocl-icd-devel samba-devel sane-backends-devel SDL2-devel vulkan-headers vulkan-loader vulkan-loader-devel

You will also need Git, Winetricks and rum.

Git and Winetricks are both available from your package manager under the same name.

• To get rum you need to clone the repo:

git clone https://gitlab.com/xkero/rum $HOME/Documents/rum

• You will now need to copy the rum script to any $PATH= environment variables so it can be used easily, to know said env you can do:

echo $PATH

• Try to use one you know won't cause any problem, /usr/local/bin should be fine:

cp $HOME/Documents/rum/rum /usr/local/bin/rum

^{you might need to make it executable with chmod}

Compiling Wine

^{Refer to the Official Documentation if you encounter any issue while building Wine.}

• cd into the directory of your liking and clone ElementalWarrior's fork:
  _{for ease of writing we will use $HOME/Documents}

git clone https://gitlab.winehq.org/ElementalWarrior/wine.git ElementalWarrior-wine

• cd into it and at this point you'll have the master branch of wine 8.3 with ElementalWarrior's fixes and implementations

• However, you will want to switch to wine 8.14 with its fixes, in this case use git switch:

git switch affinity-photo2-wine8.14

^{i will try to keep this up to date but watch the forum}

We will now build Wine using the new experimental wow64 implemented in 8.0 and improved since.
^{If you encounter issues with this build method you can find the previous guide using the "Shared WoW64" method}

We will also specify an "install" --prefix=[PATH] so it doesn't install system-wide, as it would interfere with the Wine files distributed by your package manager.

• First we will need to create two directories:

mkdir winewow64-build/ wine-install/

• Then we need to configure and compile wine:

cd winewow64-build/

../configure --prefix="$HOME/Documents/ElementalWarrior-wine/wine-install" --enable-archs=i386,x86_64

• You can now compile it using make, we will also add --jobs, to utilise more cpu cores:
  _{man make tells us:
  "-j [jobs], --jobs[=jobs] Specifies the number of jobs (commands) to run simultaneously." You may set it to around (+/- 1) the number of threads your CPU have.}

make --jobs 4

• Install it to the wine-install folder:

make install

Setting up your build and your wineprefix

^{Refer to the "Wine User Guide documentation" for more information about using wine.}

• Since this guide uses rum we need to copy our build to /opt/wines/, rum's default directory:

mkdir /opt/wines

cp --recursive "$HOME/Documents/ElementalWarrior-wine/wine-install" "/opt/wines/ElementalWarrior-8.14"

• This version of wine does not build a binary named wine64 and this can cause issues with winetricks. We will in consequence symlink the wine binary as wine64:

ln -s /opt/wines/ElementalWarrior-8.14/bin/wine /opt/wines/ElementalWarrior-8.14/bin/wine64

• Once done, you now need to use rum to create our WINEPREFIX^{$HOME/.wineAffinity} and install the necessary dependencies:

rum ElementalWarrior-8.14 $HOME/.wineAffinity wineboot --init

rum ElementalWarrior-8.14 $HOME/.wineAffinity winetricks dotnet48 corefonts

• Winetricks might set your prefix to win7 after installing dotnet, so you may need to set it back to win11 with:

rum ElementalWarrior-8.14 $HOME/.wineAffinity wine winecfg -v win11

• as mentioned in the preamble, you will need winmd files from a windows install if you wish to use a Affinity version newer than the 1.10.3
  they are located in C:/windows/system32/WinMetadata and need to go in $HOME/.wineAffinity/drive_c/windows/system32/WinMetadata

cp --recursive [WinMetadata folder path] "$HOME/.wineAffinity/drive_c/windows/system32/WinMetadata"

• You can now run any Affinity installer .exe with rum:

rum ElementalWarrior-8.14 $HOME/.wineAffinity wine [Path to the installer].exe

• Once the desired Affinity software is installed, you can launch it with:

rum ElementalWarrior-8.14 $HOME/.wineAffinity wine "$HOME/.wineAffinity/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Publisher 2/Publisher.exe"

rum ElementalWarrior-8.14 $HOME/.wineAffinity wine "$HOME/.wineAffinity/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Designer 2/Designer.exe"

rum ElementalWarrior-8.14 $HOME/.wineAffinity wine "$HOME/.wineAffinity/drive_c/Program Files/Affinity/Photo 2/Photo.exe"

• See the tips and fixes below for QoL infos

see also

• This repo's Q&A
• The Tips'n'Fixes file
• Wine User's Guide
• Wine Building Doc
• rum's README.md for its syntax
• The original forum topic

Feel free to contribute to: this repository, to ElementalWarrior's implementations, or on the forum.
You are welcome to open issues if you encounter bugs, so we can discuss them !

Thanks to ElementalWarrior for his work on the Wine fork this guide uses
Thanks to xkero for making rum