Ever since I've started using Linux, I've wished to be able to switch to it full-time, at least on my Windows PCs. However, there have always been some barriers in my mind — after all, not every Windows app is available for Linux. And one of the last holdouts for a while was image editing, because there really isn't a good competitor to Photoshop out there, and certainly not a free one.

Or so I thought for the longest time. But recently, something magical happened. Canva, after acquiring the team behind Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher, launched the free Affinity app that brings together all three of the aforementioned apps. And while it doesn't officially support Linux, the community has stepped up to fix that. So, if you're someone working in image and photo editing, Linux is one step closer to perfection.

Affinity on Linux

A community project that works surprisingly well

As I mentioned above, Affinity isn't officially supported on Linux, but even before the unified app existed, there was a project called Affinity on Linux that aims to make all the Affinity apps work better on Linux-based systems.

The project leverages a custom version of Wine, along with some extra modifications to help the app run smoothly on Linux, and it's honestly impressive. You get an easy-to-use GUI installer that also makes it easier to update to newer versions of the app as needed, so there's really no big downside. You can get started by just running this command:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ryzendew/AffinityOnLinux/refs/heads/main/AffinityScripts/AffinityLinuxInstaller.py | python3

Once it's installed, Affinity runs very well on Linux. I've occasionally experienced some visual glitches, but for the most part, the app performs well and all the features I rely on are supported just fine, so I have no issues there.

I do want to mention that the Affinity team says a Linux version of the app is one of the top requests from its users, and that such a thing is under serious consideration internally. Sometime in the future, you may not have to rely on a community project, but for now, this is still a great solution.

How good is Affinity?

It does everything I really need

As an alternative to Photoshop, Affinity is very solid for my needs. Most of the tools I'm used to are here, and it even incorporates RAW development tools similar to Lightroom, making it even better as an all-in-one tool.

For the past few weeks, since Affinity was made available for free, it's been my go-to for all my photo edits, and the results have always been pretty good. I actually use it a lot more as a Lightroom alternative than a Photoshop competitor (simply because I used Lightroom more than Photoshop in the first place), but even in the latter case, it's served me quite well.

I've said it before, but one of my most loved features in Photoshop is the AI-powered object selection, and it works almost as well here. Neither one is perfect, and Affinity gets close enough to Photoshop's object recognition that I wouldn't consider it a problem. Sometimes it requires a little more work to smooth out the edges of objects and make them presentable, but for the most part, both of these work just as well.

Otherwise, the tools I use all work fine. It's easy enough to create multiple layers, apply clipping masks, design gradients, and apply layer effects to create pleasant images. For example, I created the featured image for XDA's Best of 2025 article using Affinity, and it turned out just as well as it would have on Photoshop. Any lack of quality there has more to do with my creative skills than a fault of the software. I created the background gradient, added the layers for all the objects, and added an outline to the products in that image. I've also been using Affinity to make thumbnails for videos on my personal YouTube channel, where I use most of the same features.

One thing Photoshop still has over it has smart object removal, though most of the time, Affinity does just fine with clone stamping. It's just a little more manual than before.

It also replaced Lightroom

RAW photo development and corrections

Developing RAW photos definitely isn't the main focus for Affinity, but it still does a pretty good job of it. Really, the only downfall it has is that it's not designed for editing photos en masse, meaning you'll have to open them one by one, or a handful at a time lest you risk crashing the app.

Otherwise, I've been quite happy with how it works. Affinity misses out on a lot of the automated settings Lightroom offers, like automatic brightness and noise removal, but I've become ok with this for a couple of reasons. For the automatic brightness correction, I found that I almost always had to make slight tweaks to Lightroom's settings anyway, so with Affinity, I can just save presets for the most common lighting scenarios I work in, and make the same small tweaks for each photo as needed. Creating those presets took a little more work, but it always gets me pretty close to the look I want, so I can then refine it.

And just like the brightness settings, Affinity lets me save presets for noise reduction and detail adjustments, which usually gets me right where I want the photo to be. It's a pretty big deal because even though Lightroom automates that process entirely with its AI-powered Denoise, this usually takes 40 seconds on the Apple M4 processor, and that's got a pretty capable GPU. On the hardware where I run Linux right now, this would usually take close to three minutes, so it would end up taking longer to process.

The development assistant also includes a more interesting tool for removing blemishes. You can click a blemish and Affinity will automatically use another area of the photo as a sample to correct the blemish. But you can also click and drag to manually select the area to draw from for the blemish removal, and it works very well. The automatic fix isn't as accurate as Lightroom every time, but having more manual control helps make up for that.

Affinity is the graphics editor everyone should be using on Linux

It trades blows back and forth, but I have honestly settled just fine into the workload in Affinity, which is high praise coming from me. I could never tolerate GIMP or Krita as replacements for Photoshop, and I've even written about how alternatives like Darktable and RawTherapee don't quite cut it as alternatives to Lightroom, either. Affinity stands above all other free solutions I've tried, and even though it's not native on Linux, the Affinity on Linux project has done excellent work to make it work really well.