Add Elementary OS as supported Plattform

[dwetscher]

Since you already support Mint (based on Ubuntu) and Ubuntu itself, it would be nice to also support Elementary OS.

[beew]

It already works for elementary OS. I tested it out on a qemu vm

Here is how for elementary OS 8

Since elementary OS is very crippled and lacks basic functionalities of other Linux distros, starts with installing software-properties-common, without that you won't be able to enable other repositories. It is installed by default in all other debian based distros except elementary OS.

sudo apt install software-properties-common

Now add the winehq repository for Ubuntu 24.04. The default wine versions in Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04 don't work. While you could choose the wine version to run Affinity after it is installed, the python install script uses system wine to run the Affinity exe installer. It crashes for the official wine versions in Ubuntu 24.04 and Ubuntu 26.04, there is probably something missing in the debian build (see my question and answer for installing Affinity in Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04)

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

sudo mkdir -pm755 /etc/apt/keyrings

sudo wget -O /etc/apt/keyrings/winehq-archive.key https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key

sudo wget -NP /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/noble/winehq-noble.sources

sudo apt update

In normal Ubuntu 24.04 both dotnet8 and dotnet10 are in the repo but elementary OS may be different. You could check with

sudo apt search dotnet

If dotnet 8 or 10 is missing add the dot net backports ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dotnet/backports

sudo apt update

Now install the dependencies

sudo apt update
sudo apt install --install-recommends -y winehq-staging \
  winetricks wget curl p7zip-full tar jq zstd \
  dotnet-sdk-8.0 dotnet-sdk-10.0 \
  python3-pyqt6

Now download the Linux-Affinity-Installer python script without running

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ryzendew/AffinityOnLinux/refs/heads/main/AffinityScripts/AffinityLinuxInstaller.py -o install.py

Open the file install.py with a text editoir and change line #9901 to

is_mint = distro_name.lower() in ["linux mint", "mint", "zorin", "elementary OS"]

Now just run the script and follow the steps

python3 /path/to/install.py

Now after installing if you want to open a file the system's (elementary OS's) gtk file picker opens, but the gtk file picker doesn't have an "All Files" option for security reasons so some photo formats like .NEF won't show up. They only show up in the file pickers of specialized software like gimp. If your file doesn't show up in the gtk file picker use the search function (ctrl +F) in the file picker to find and open it. In other DE you could simply close the gtk file picker and Affinity's file picker would open, but in Pantheon there is no close button for the file picker.

The same workflow works for all Debian based distros that are not explicitly supported such as mate, mint-LMDE , Pop!_OS etc. I tested it on Debian 13 (winehq + contrib + microsoft's repo for dotnet and edit install.py to add "debian" to the is_mint list)