Putting the Affinity graphics suite on Linux
Art Time
© Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash
Affinity is an award-winning photo editing, graphic design, and page layout tool suite that will run on Linux – with a little help from Wine.
The Adobe Suite is the most popular tool for digital artists of all kinds, including photographers, creators, and illustrators. It works well, but it becomes more bloated with each release. Also, the Adobe Suite requires an expensive subscription, and most importantly, Adobe has ignored Linux for decades. The suite does not offer Linux support, and performance under Wine is subpar. Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program [1] ) is developed slowly, and CMYK color model support [2] was introduced only in Version 3. Krita [3] is very promising but is optimized primarily for digital painting. Are Gimp and Krita good enough to serve as professional tools on Linux for book or digital media illustration, wedding album creation, or private club invitations? It depends on the tasks and workflow, but I'd expect a lot of pitfalls and painful surprises. Luckily, a user-friendly alternative for Linux is now available.
The Affinity Suite [4] is a toolkit for photo editing, graphic design, and page layout that normally runs on macOS, Windows, and iPad systems. Affinity and the open source community have undertaken a long-term effort to get Affinity applications working in Linux using Wine [5]. Currently, this solution requires a patched Wine-staging (experimental Wine fork), but hopefully it will eventually be able to work with stable Wine, which will make installation easier and allow average users to get it up and running in a few clicks. Sadly, at this time, the installation takes a little more effort.
System Requirements
To fully realize the potential of Affinity on Linux, you'll need the following hardware:
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia