Wine 11.12: guaranteed startup crash (FoundationContract TypeLoadException) — works on 10.10

[boneyland]

On my system, Affinity v3 installed via the GUI installer with ElementalWarrior Wine 11.12 crashes with a fatal System.TypeLoadException (Windows.Foundation.FoundationContract cannot be loaded) every time, at startup, once the main window has loaded. The installer deliberately skips WinMetadata and wintypes.dll setup on 11.12 (Skipping WinMetadata and wintypes.dll setup for Wine 11.12+ (not needed)), but on this machine 11.12's built-in WinRT metadata support does not appear to work. Manually adding WinMetadata and the wintypes shim did not fix it under 11.12.

A clean install using Wine 10.10 (where the installer's WinMetadata + wintypes setup actually runs) works perfectly on the same machine.

System

• Distro: Fedora Workstation 44 (kernel 7.1.1)
• Desktop: GNOME (Wayland session)
• Hardware: ASUS Vivobook, AMD Ryzen 5 7520U with Radeon 610M (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO), 16 GB RAM, no dGPU
• Install method: GUI installer (AffinityLinuxInstaller.py), Affinity v3 Enterprise EXE
• Wine: ElementalWarrior-wine-11.12 (installer-provided)
• APL/WineFix: v0.3.0 (latest at time of writing)
• vkd3d-proton: 3.0.1 (build 3b10bd7a7ec6a73)

The crash (Wine 11.12)

The app fully initialises: APL stages 0–4 complete, WineFix patches apply, vkd3d-proton initialises cleanly on RADV (SM 6.8, DXR, "DX Ultimate supported"). Then, when the startup message/update dialog runs, it dies:

[ERROR] FATAL UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type of field
'Serif.Affinity.UI.Dialogs.UpdateDialog:m_operation' (2) due to: Could not load file or
assembly 'Windows.Foundation.FoundationContract, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies.
  at Serif.Affinity.Services.UserInterfaceService.<ShowStartup>b__60_0 () ...
  ...
  at (wrapper dynamic-method) MonoMod.Utils.DynamicMethodDefinition.Serif.Affinity.Application.PostLoad_Patch1(Serif.Affinity.Application)
  at Serif.Affinity.Application+<>c.<OnMainWindowLoaded>b__189_0 () ...
  ...
0134:err:mscoree:expect_no_runtimes Process exited with a Mono runtime loaded.
Affinity exited with code 1

Relevant startup log excerpt (successful init up to the crash)

0134:err:winediag:wined3d_dll_init Using the Vulkan renderer.
[APL/Core] Plugin loaded: WineFix v0.3.0 by Noah Curoe & WineFix Contributors
[APL/Core] Stage 1 complete: patches applied
0188:fixme:d3d:adapter_vk_init_driver_info Failed to retrieve GPU description for device "AMD Radeon 610M (RADV RAPHAEL_MENDOCINO)" 1002:1506.
vkd3d-proton:vkd3d_get_vk_version: vkd3d-proton - applicationVersion: 3.0.1.
vkd3d-proton:d3d12_device_caps_init_shader_model: Enabling support for SM 6.8.
vkd3d-proton:d3d12_device_determine_ray_tracing_tier: DXR 1.1 support enabled.
vkd3d-proton:d3d12_device_caps_init_feature_level: DX Ultimate supported!
[APL/0Harmony] === Stage 4: UiReady ===
[APL/0Harmony] Stage 4 complete
[ERROR] FATAL UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: System.TypeLoadException ... (as above)

What I tried under Wine 11.12 (all reproduced the identical crash)

1. WINEDLLOVERRIDES="opencl=d" — no change (crash is unrelated to OpenCL).
2. Manually installed WinMetadata into drive_c/windows/system32/WinMetadata/ using the project's own archive (releases/download/10.4-Wine-Affinity/WinMetadata.tar.xz). All .winmd files present and verified. No change. Note: the GUI's Reinstall WinMetadata button reports Skipping WinMetadata and wintypes.dll setup for Wine 11.12+ (not needed) and then WinMetadata reinstallation completed! without doing anything.
3. Manually installed the wintypes shim the installer uses for 9.14/10.10: downloaded wintypes_shim.dll.so from ElementalWarrior/wine-wintypes.dll-for-affinity, placed as wintypes.dll next to Affinity.exe, and set HKCU\Software\Wine\DllOverrides\wintypes = native. The module loads (no err:module output) but the crash is unchanged.
4. Launched fully offline (WiFi off) to suppress the update check, still crashed.
5. wineboot -u prefix update under 11.12 — no change.

Other installer issues hit along the way

• First install run aborted at the final step with Could not run AffinityHook.exe: illegal environment variable name (Python env handling). Because it aborted there, vkd3d-proton was never installed into the prefix, producing a cascade of err:module:import_dll Library d3d12.dll ... not found (→ libdxcore → libraster → librenderer → libStory → libpsd → libpersona ...) on every launch until I installed vkd3d-proton 3.0.1 manually. This error caused the memory usage to increase so much that it was killed by the kernel OOM killer and crashed.
• Second run failed at Failed to download winefix-v0.3.0.zip: <urlopen error [Errno 110] Connection timed out> — transient, but a retry/resume for release downloads would help.

What fixed it

A completely clean install choosing Wine 10.10, letting the installer run its full WinMetadata + wintypes setup as designed. The app now launches and runs correctly. Same machine, same Affinity EXE, same everything else. Still need to manually download and install some of the files.

Happy to provide more logs or do something additional if that can help.

[rinormaloku]

I can confirm this exact crash (Windows.Foundation.FoundationContract, Version=4.0.0.0 → TypeLoadException at UpdateDialog:m_operation) on completely different hardware: Ryzen 9 7950X, RTX 4070, Ubuntu 26.04, GNOME/Wayland. Same crash, on hardware unrelated to yours (AMD APU laptop vs. NVIDIA desktop) — so I don't think this is machine-specific.

Root cause: Wine 11.12 (and 11.12-v4) run Affinity on wine-mono. Wine-Mono's own maintainer has confirmed it doesn't implement loading .winmd files as managed WinRT contract assemblies at all (see wine-mono/wine-mono#196). The installer's assumption that "WinMetadata and wintypes.dll setup [is] not needed for Wine 11.12+" doesn't hold for Affinity v3 — the missing piece isn't WinMetadata/wintypes (that's for native COM/RoGetActivationFactory calls), it's that Mono can't resolve the managed assembly reference to Windows.Foundation.FoundationContract at all. No amount of WinMetadata/wintypes.dll fiddling fixes that (matches what you already found).

What actually fixed it for me: installing real Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8 into the 11.12/v4 prefix, same as the installer already does for 9.14/10.10:

winetricks -q remove_mono dotnet48

This also sets the native DLL override for mscoree (winetricks does this automatically as part of the dotnet48 verb). After that, mscoree.dll and clr.dll become genuine Microsoft binaries instead of Wine's mono-backed stubs, and Affinity gets past the FoundationContract crash entirely — the startup/update dialog loads correctly and the app runs normally (tested: vector shapes, drag & drop, working canvas).

My guess is the installer's fix would be to drop the wine-version gate on the WinMetadata/winetricks-dotnet setup step (or at least also run dotnet48 for 11.12/11.12-v4), rather than assuming built-in WinRT support is sufficient for those versions.

Two more things I hit and fixed after that, in case they're useful for others:

• Tooltips render dark-text-on-dark-background (unreadable). This repo's own wine-dark-theme.reg fixes it — the default InfoText/InfoWindow colors are light-theme values, which clash with Affinity's own dark UI. Might be worth applying this automatically as part of setup, if it isn't already for the 11.12+ path.
• Save/close confirmation dialogs sometimes render fully blank/white on first show, correct on a second attempt. This is a well-known WPF-on-Wine bug (see WineHQ bug #49055 and several other independent reports), fixed with:

  wine reg add "HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics" /v DisableHWAcceleration /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
  

  This disables WPF's own hardware-accelerated UI compositor, not Affinity's separate document/canvas rendering pipeline — no performance impact observed on the actual editing canvas.

Happy to open a PR for the WinMetadata/dotnet48 gate change if that's welcome.

[MaoDzeDun]

Just to throw my two cents - same problem on Fedora Workstation 44 with an RTX 3060ti and RTX 5070. What solved it (at least for now) for me was, on the 3060ti machine, to switch the Wine version for 10.10 and then back to 11.12. On the RTX 5070 machine I just uninstalled and then installed again and it now works. Hope this helps.