Canva's Affinity account confirmed on X that a Linux version is in "active development". That is the entire announcement: no date, no technical detail, no roadmap. Heise's report notes the timing is not accidental — the iPad app just shipped, which makes Linux the next platform in the queue.
For anyone who has watched this particular wish go unfulfilled for years, the interesting part is who is speaking. Affinity's marketing chief Liam Fisher floated a Linux version at the opening of Canva's Johannesburg office in November 2025. Community pressure has been steady since. Now the vendor itself has said the words.
The commercial logic has changed twice. Serif, the British developer, was acquired by Canva in March 2024. In late October 2025, Affinity v3 collapsed Photo, Designer and Publisher into a single app and released it free — with AI features such as generative fill, background removal and expansion gated behind Canva Pro at €12 a month or €110 a year. On Linux, that would make it the only professional-grade, commercially backed design suite on the platform, next to Krita, GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus.
Whether it arrives as a native build or as a Wine wrapper is unanswered, and the difference is not cosmetic: hardware acceleration, UI scaling and the update mechanism are exactly where the existing community project AffinityOnLinux runs into limits. That project already runs the Windows build under Wine, with a community plugin handling the Canva login — good enough to prove demand, not good enough to ship.
The files it opens — PSD, AI, IDML, PDF, SVG — are the reason this matters beyond hobbyists. Design and prepress shops that keep a Windows or macOS machine around solely for Affinity and Adobe files would get a reason to retire it. That is a small market and a loud one.
No date means no story yet about performance, GPU support, or whether the free tier survives. What can be said today: the last major "would you please" in desktop Linux design software now has an answer, and the answer is "in progress."
