Affinity Designer hangs or fails to open attached document on Fedora 44 (opens normally on Windows)

[shelusine]

Summary
I'm seeing a reproducible issue with Affinity Designer on Fedora where certain vector documents either become extremely slow to edit or fail to open entirely.

The same documents open and edit normally on Windows using the same version of Affinity Designer.

System

• Fedora 44
• GNOME (Wayland)
• NVIDIA RTX 3090
• Intel i7-4790K
• Affinity Designer 3.2.3 (build 4646)
• Affinity on Linux using the bundled ElementalWarrior Wine 11.12 runtime

Expected behavior
The document should open normally and node editing should remain responsive.

Actual behavior

• Simple logo work becomes extremely slow when editing nodes.
• One particular document hangs during loading and eventually triggers document recovery instead of opening.
• The exact same document opens immediately on Windows.

Observations

• The artwork is not especially complex.
• Live effects and GPU accelerated filters remain smooth.
• Disabling snapping makes no difference.
• CPU usage remains low while the document is hanging.
• RAM is not exhausted.
• The issue appears to depend on the geometry/scale of the vector artwork. In some cases, making the artwork larger changes the behavior.

Debugging performed
So far I've verified:

• The bundled Wine runtime is being used (Wine 11.12).
• The issue is not caused by system Wine.
• Environment variables appear normal.
• journalctl mostly reports standard Wine fixme messages, although I noticed repeated Direct2D DrawGeometry messages while opening the document.

Reproduction

• Launch Affinity Designer.
• Open the attached document.
• The application hangs while opening and eventually enters document recovery.
  The same file opens normally on Windows.

Attachments

• Problematic .af document
• Screen recording of the issue
  logo_guidelines.zip
  https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fbfa232d-559e-45f5-b3fb-137da1184fa5

If there's any additional logging or a debug build you'd like me to test, I'm happy to help.

[pi317]

Hello, I posted exactly the same behaviour, especially when working on complex vector illustrations or complex fonts (like Veneer). See below. same repetitive fixme message. It has become much less frequent with the 3.2 appimage.

Description:
I experienced complete application freezes when working with groups of many vector objects, or with decorative fonts generating complex path geometry (e.g. Veneer). In my case, applying transparency triggered the freeze, requiring a system restart.

Environment:

AppImage (latest v3)
Linux Mint, kernel 6.17, X11/Cinnamon
AMD Radeon (radeonsi/Renoir)

What the log shows:

Running the AppImage from console revealed this line repeating hundreds of times:
fixme:d2d:d2d_device_context_DrawGeometry Ignoring stroke style XXXXXXXX.
From what I understand, this appears to be an unimplemented stub in Wine's D2D layer. I'm not certain this is the direct cause of the freeze, but the correlation is consistent and reproducible.
I also tried LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 — the freeze still occurred, which suggests the issue may not be GPU-driver related.

Reproduced with:

Group of hundreds of vector objects with stroke styles → apply transparency → freeze
Text in a decorative font with complex path geometry (Veneer) → freeze

Workaround that worked for me: (unsatisfying for professionnel work)

Right-click the group in the Layers panel → Rasterize ("Tramer" in French UI) before applying effects. This eliminated the freeze in my case. Not ideal if you need to keep objects editable, but it unblocks the workflow.