**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 are now a unified app, which is free to download and use on Windows and macOS (generative AI features require a Canva Pro subscription). Interestingly, the new Affinity team has said it is taking calls for an official Linux version seriously. But until it does more than answer user requests with something tangible, the community has stepped in. ## AffinityOnLinux: Run Affinity Easily The _Linux Affinity Installer_ project has made it easy to run the Windows version of this creative suite – which handles raster graphics, vector and desktop publishing – on Linux. There are two ways to go about it: The first is a regular installation method that uses your local version of Wine (and required dependencies) installed from your distro’s repo and applies some tweaks. The second, ideal for those looking for something easier, is a standalone AppImage that contains everything needed to run Affinity on Linux. Now, here’s the thing: the project GitHub page lists Ubuntu (and Ubuntu-based distros like Linux Mint and ZorinOS) as “unsupported” for the _regular_ installation method owing to outdated or missing dependencies. But the AppImage route works fine. I opted to use the AppImage on my Ubuntu 24.04 LTS install and it works fine. What I lose in disk space (since I do have Wine installed) I gain in time: the AppImage is less hassle, so there’s no fighting with Wine configs and prefixes, checking logs for missing libraries, figuring out what to install and where, re-trying, etc. The AppImage works like the rest The AppImage bundles the Windows version of Affinity 3.0.2 alongside a preconfigured Wine 10.x install, along with a slew of dependencies and tweaks. Download it, mark it executable, and run – that’s it. Remember: to run AppImages on Ubuntu you must install `libfuse2t64` first. Still, perfection isn’t a given. The team delivering this unofficial effort do so on a best-effort basis. The AppImage should “just work”, but depending on your exact setup, there may be quirks. 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. A DPI slider appears the first time you run the AppImage to adjust UI scaling too, and you can run the AppImage with the `--winecfg` command from your terminal to access Wine settings, if you need to. Use a tool like _GearLever_ to create a launcher linked to the Affinity AppImage. This will make it easier to find and open the suite alongside other installed apps. This AppImage is only available for 64-bit Intel/AMD systems (not ARM as it uses the official Windows installer), and you should make sure you have enough free disk space for both the ~1.2GB AppImage and the files and folders it may need to download on first-run. ### Download and Try Interested to kick the tyres? You’ll find details on the project GitHub, including links to known issues, and installation instructions if you don’t want to use the AppImage. If you do, 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._**

https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-problem

Last night, my wife looks up from her computer, troubled. She tells me she can’t log into her computer running Windows 11, as every time she enters the PIN code to her account, the login screen throws up a cryptic error: “Your credentials could not be verified”. She’s using the correct PIN code, so that surely isn’t it. We opt for the gold standard in troubleshooting and perform a quick reboot, but that doesn’t fix it. My initial instinct is that since she’s using an online account instead of a local one, perhaps Microsoft is having some server issues? A quick check online indicates that no, Microsoft’s servers seem to be running fine, and to be honest, I don’t even know if that would have an effect on logging into Windows in the first place. The Windows 11 login screen does give us a link to click in case you forget your PIN code. Despite the fact the PIN code she’s entering is correct, we try to go through this process to see if it goes anywhere. This is where things really start to get weird. A few dialogs flash in and out of existence, until it’s showing us a dialog telling us to insert a security USB key of some sort, which we don’t have. Dismissing it gives us an option to try other login methods, including a basic password login. This, too, doesn’t work; just like with the PIN code, Windows 11 claims the accurate, correct password my wife is entering is invalid (just to be safe, we tested it by logging into her Microsoft account on her phone, which works just fine). In the account selection menu in the bottom-left, an ominous new account mysteriously appears: WsiAccount. The next option we try is to actually change the PIN code. This doesn’t work either. Windows wants us to use a second factor using my wife’s phone number, but this throws up another weird error, this time claiming the SMS service to send the code isn’t working. A quick check online once again confirms the service seems to be working just fine for everybody else. I’m starting to get really stumped and frustrated. Of course, during all of this, we’re both searching the web to find anything that might help us figure out what’s going on. None of our searches bring up anything useful, and none of our findings seem to be related to or match up with the issue we’re having. While she’s looking at her phone and I’m browsing on my Fedora/KDE PC next to hers, she quickly mentions she’s getting a notification that OneDrive is full, which is odd, since she doesn’t use OneDrive for anything. We take this up as a quick sidequest, and we check up on her OneDrive account on her phone. As OneDrive loads, our jaws drop in amazement: a big banner warning is telling her she’s using over 5500% of her 5GB free account. We look at each other and burst out laughing. We exchange some confused words, and then we realise what is going on: my wife just got a brand new Samsung Galaxy S25, and Samsung has some sort of deal with Microsoft to integrate its services into Samsung’s variant of Android. Perhaps during the process of transferring data and applications from her old to her new phone, OneDrive syncing got turned on? A quick trip to the Samsung Gallery application confirms our suspicions: the phone is synchronising over 280GB of photos and videos to OneDrive. My wife was never asked for consent to turn this feature on, so it must’ve been turned on by default. We quickly turn it off, delete the 280GB of photos and videos from OneDrive, and move on to the real issue at hand. Since nothing seems to work, and none of what we find online brings us any closer to what’s going on with her Windows 11 installation, we figured it’s time to bring out the big guns. For the sake of brevity, let’s run through the things we tried. Booting into safe mode doesn’t work; we get the same login problems. Trying to uninstall the latest updates, an option in WinRE, doesn’t work, and throws up an unspecified error. We try to use a restore point, but despite knowing for 100% certain the feature to periodically create restore points is enabled, the only available restore point is from 2022, and is located on a drive other than her root drive (or “C:\” in Windows parlance). Using the reset option in WinRE doesn’t work either, as it also throws up an error, this time about not having enough free space. I also walk through a few more complex suggestions, like a few manual registry hacks related to the original error using cmd.exe in WinRE. None of it yields any results. It’s now approaching midnight, and we need to get up early to drop the kids off at preschool, so I tell my wife I’ll reinstall her copy of Windows 11 tomorrow. We’re out of ideas. The next day, I decide to give it one last go before opting for the trouble of going through a reinstallation. The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account. It involves booting into WinRE, loading up cmd.exe, and replacing utilman.exe in system32 with cmd.exe: If you then proceed to boot into Windows 11 and click on the Accessibility icon in the bottom-right, it will open “utilman.exe”, but since that’s just cmd.exe with the utilman.exe name, you get a command prompt to work with, right on the login screen. From here, you can launch regedit, find the correct key, change a REG_BINARY, save, and reboot. At the login screen, you’ll see a new “adminstrator” account with full access to your computer. During the various reboots, I do some more web searching, and I stumble upon a post on

Attached: 1 image Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara” released! https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4881