Linux lacks native versions of industry-grade creative tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and while open-source options are capable, not everyone is willing to relearn and adapt to different tools.
Thankfully, the gap in commercial design software is plugged with workarounds involving Wine, the Windows compatibility layer – which is how you can run Affinity v3 on Linux.
Affinity, acquired by Canva in 2024, moved to a freemium model in 2025. Photo, Designer and Publisher tools were merged into a unified app and made free to download and use on Windows and macOS (generative AI features cost, but are optional).
Canva has said it the request for a native Linux build is something it’s taking seriously.
But until it actions the request with something tangible, the community has stepped into make it easy to use the latest version of Affinity on Linux desktops, complete with GPU acceleration.
AffinityOnLinux: Run Affinity Easily
The Linux Affinity Installer project makes it easy to run the creative suite outside of Windows and macOS.
There project provides two methods: a regular installer that uses your local version of Wine and required dependencies installed your distro’s repo; or a standalone AppImage that contains everything needed to run Affinity on Linux.
For the former method, the project documentations lists Ubuntu (and Ubuntu-based distros) as being “unsupported” due to outdated or missing dependencies.
But the AppImage works on Ubuntu. This is what I used for taking the screenshots strewn throughout this article.
What you lose in disk space (assuming you have Wine installed) you gain in time. The AppImage means less hassle, i.e., fighting with Wine configs and prefixes, checking logs for missing libraries, installing them, re-trying, etc.
The AppImage bundles the Windows version of Affinity v3 into a self-contained AppImage alongside a preconfigured Wine install. Download it, mark it executable, and run – that’s it. A DPI slider appears the first time you run the AppImage to adjust UI scaling.
Still, don’t demand perfection from a third-party, unofficial Wine wrapper. The team making this is doing so on a best-effort basis.
The AppImage includes most dependencies and should “just work”, but there may be edge cases. This build also lacks automatic updates, and it doesn’t integrate as cleanly with the underlying OS the way a normal install would.
Hardware acceleration may require additional setup and dependencies for NVIDIA dGPUs, but will run on iGPUs well; there is a known memory bug that occurs under specific circumstances; and some system dialogs and prompts may not appear.
The AppImage is only available for 64-bit Intel/AMD systems, not ARM (as it uses the official Windows installer), and ensure you’ve enough free disk space. The 1.2 GB AppImage will, when run, has to generate and fetch things too.
More details on the project GitHub, or go ahead and download the AppImage from the Affinity Linux Installer releases page.
Would you like to see Canva bring Affinity to Linux officially, even as a Wine wrapper? Or would you prefer more effort to go into making FOSS tools like Krita, Inkscape and GIMP? Let me know in the comments.