How well does it work on Linux?

[Murmuüre]

If you're using it on Linux, could you please share your distro and whether it's using X11 or Wayland as a compositor? Does tablet pressure sensitivity work? Thanks in advance.

[mango]

I'm trying to run on Linux Mint, but it is not opening. I tried to install some libs with the help of Gemini and ChatGPT, the further I could go was to splash screen before it crashes again. I tried to run the windows version under proton and had the same result. SP 2022 wroked like a charm. :(
I will try once more tomorrow before I decide to ask for a refund and leave a justified negative review.

[Murmuüre]

Originally posted by mango:

I'm trying to run on Linux Mint, but it is not opening. I tried to install some libs with the help of Gemini and ChatGPT, the further I could go was to splash screen before it crashes again. I tried to run the windows version under proton and had the same result. SP 2022 wroked like a charm. :(
I will try once more tomorrow before I decide to ask for a refund and leave a justified negative review.

Thanks for sharing your experience! Are the libraries you installed xcb-util-cursor and libtiff5? Those two are something I've seen recommended in workarounds on the internet (for example here: https://www.somethinglikegames.de/en/blog/2025/linux_03_installation-linux-sw/). They also recommend setting compatibility to "Legacy runtime 1.0". Did tablet pressure sensitivity work for you in SP 2022? I used Windows version of Substance 8 on Linux before and it did work well with the only issue of pressure sensitivity not working, which is kinda important if you want to do any handpainting at all.

[mango]

Hey Murmuure. Here is a better explanation:
I’m trying to run Substance 3D Painter 2026 from Steam on Linux Mint 22.3. Painter 2022 works fine, but 2026 does not launch.

So far, I tested the native Linux version first, not Proton. Running the binary manually initially failed with libtiff.so.5 missing. I also hit Qt/X11 issues like missing libxcb-cursor0. After that, I tried a few workaround steps, including installing missing host libraries, testing Steam Linux Runtime options, and briefly trying GE-Proton, but that led to more runtime conflicts.

The main problem seems to be Steam/Pressure Vessel mixing runtimes and libraries. At different points I got errors for missing libbrotli*, a FreeType symbol error in libQt6WebEngineCore.so.6 (FT_Get_Color_Glyph_Paint), and later Qt failing to initialize the xcb platform plugin. After cleaning that up, I launched Steam with steam -compat-force-slr off, and now the native binary gets further but still fails because libtiff.so.5 is not available on Mint 22.3 by default.

At the moment, I’m trying to confirm the cleanest way to run the native Linux build on Mint 22.3 with the correct libtiff5 package and without Steam forcing the wrong runtime or Proton.

[kAeSeFaUsT]

Oh my! At least I'm not alone in my pain. Linux Mint user as well.

I had Substance Painter 2018 running years ago and I guess I did the libtiff6 > libtiff5 trick back then (but forgot about it). But I remember that it wasn't that confusing back then (compatibility options, legacy runtime, proton, sniper, soldier, ...) and it would run flawlessly.

Now I purchased the 2026 version and it's a mess. Without the compatibility option's "Force Use..." it wouldn't even show the splash screen, the only way to get to see the UI is when I use "Legacy Runtime 1.0" (whatever that means).

So far so good (I thought). The thumbnails of the factory materials were generated successfully, I can import a mesh, bake all kinds of maps, start painting, add fill layers and even smart materials. But as soon as I add (drag&drop or select from the list that pops up in the fill layer properties) a material, the texture on the object is updated in the viewport and half a second later Painter displays a crash dialogue. I tried all things different AIs suggested but to no avail.

The strange thing is that as long as a material is inside a smart material I can tweak its parameters and the viewport refreshes and all is stable. But as soon as I dare to apply a material on an object it crashes.

And to make the confusion even bigger there are materials that don't crash. For example the "Bandage" material: I can tweak all parameters and it's stable. The "Carbon Fiber" material right next to it crashes SP every single time. Most other materials do.

It's very very frustrating. Is this a Linux Mint / Ubuntu thing only and all the other Linux guys are happy? I hope someone finds the magic potion.

[kAeSeFaUsT]

OK, I now spent a lot of time getting this to work. I installed Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS x86_64 from scratch (which is THE recommended Linux OS) but to no avail.
After installing lots of missing libs and dependencies even on the recommended OS Painter just refused to start.
My Painter 2018 version is still running smoothly on the very same hardware and OS (but doesn't have the new features I paid for).
I'm getting sad.

[kAeSeFaUsT]

Is there any Linux user happily using Painter 2026?
I spent the whole day installing CachyOS, Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, Debian 12 and Fedora 43 and wasn't able to successfully install and run Painter 2026 so far.
Every single distro complained about missing libtiff5 (which can be fixed or rather worked around), libssl and dozens of other dependencies and locales.
The best I could get was that I could open the GUI but each time it failed as soon as I applied an sbsar material on an object. 6 different Linuxes -> same crash.
I would be very happy if anyone successfully (and painlessly) running Painter 2026 could post the system specs / Linux distro here.

[Duffydan26]

Try run

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so.6 /usr/lib/libtiff.so.5

this will just create a symlink by naming the file libtiff5 and trick Substance Painter in thinking it's libtiff5 when it's running libtiff6

and I've managed to get it run fine


also with the compatibility layer - Run it in Runtime Legacy 1.0

I'm using a beefy system when I was testing and didn't have any crashes yet -

Ryzen 9 9950X3D
RTX 5090
64 GB RAM

Also going to test on my laptop too and will report back

[kAeSeFaUsT]

Thanks for trying to help. But you wouldn't believe how many times I tried this exact move during the past 2 days in 5 different Linux distros. I've also tried all the compatibility options, to no avail.
I see you're running it without problems. Can you share your system specs and especially what distro you're on?

[Duffydan26]

Originally posted by kAeSeFaUsT:

Thanks for trying to help. But you wouldn't believe how many times I tried this exact move during the past 2 days in 5 different Linux distros. I've also tried all the compatibility options, to no avail.
I see you're running it without problems. Can you share your system specs and especially what distro you're on?

Operating System: CachyOS Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.24.0
Qt Version: 6.10.2
Kernel Version: 6.19.9-1-cachyos (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 32 × Intel® Core™ i9-14900HX
Memory: 64 GiB of RAM (62.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: Intel® Graphics
Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU
Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.
Product Name: Vector 16 HX A14VGG
System Version: REV:1.0


Running it on a laptop at the moment. I am experience crashes when trying to drag and drop certain basic materials though? It only occurs with certain ones, everything else works fine though

One last option I haven't tried is to use an X11 Display Server only, no Wayland at all. As that might be more Stable. But I'd have to try it.

[Duffydan26]

Originally posted by kAeSeFaUsT:

Oh my! At least I'm not alone in my pain. Linux Mint user as well.

I had Substance Painter 2018 running years ago and I guess I did the libtiff6 > libtiff5 trick back then (but forgot about it). But I remember that it wasn't that confusing back then (compatibility options, legacy runtime, proton, sniper, soldier, ...) and it would run flawlessly.

Now I purchased the 2026 version and it's a mess. Without the compatibility option's "Force Use..." it wouldn't even show the splash screen, the only way to get to see the UI is when I use "Legacy Runtime 1.0" (whatever that means).

So far so good (I thought). The thumbnails of the factory materials were generated successfully, I can import a mesh, bake all kinds of maps, start painting, add fill layers and even smart materials. But as soon as I add (drag&drop or select from the list that pops up in the fill layer properties) a material, the texture on the object is updated in the viewport and half a second later Painter displays a crash dialogue. I tried all things different AIs suggested but to no avail.

The strange thing is that as long as a material is inside a smart material I can tweak its parameters and the viewport refreshes and all is stable. But as soon as I dare to apply a material on an object it crashes.

And to make the confusion even bigger there are materials that don't crash. For example the "Bandage" material: I can tweak all parameters and it's stable. The "Carbon Fiber" material right next to it crashes SP every single time. Most other materials do.

It's very very frustrating. Is this a Linux Mint / Ubuntu thing only and all the other Linux guys are happy? I hope someone finds the magic potion.

I am getting it too on CachyOS, So something is scuffed

[kAeSeFaUsT]

Thanks for your replies guys,

Originally posted by Duffydan26:

Running it on a laptop at the moment. I am experience crashes when trying to drag and drop certain basic materials though? It only occurs with certain ones, everything else works fine though

That's also the best I could get, but in my case the crashes when drag&dropping materials (or selecting them from the popup list) happened with at least 95% of them. One of the few materials that worked were "Bandage". "Carbon Fiber" would reliably crash every single time.

On the positive side, I requested a refund and it was granted without any further delay.

I'll keep an eye on Substance Painter 2026 though and hope that the problem will get fixed eventually.

[Floreum]

I got it working on CachyOS. First things first you gotta set the compatibility to Legacy Runtime 1.0.
I ran a bunch of things so I'm not 100% sure what made it finally work, but it needs to be using that compatibility mode.

I'm certain it has to do with the libraries not knowing where to look like in previous versions. This may or may not work for you, I suggest opening steam via the terminal and then launching SP and feeding OpenAI or Claude the error, that was the only way I could figure out how to get it to work, bring up you might need to symlink some files so it hopefully gets to the point faster.

But this is what they got me to run. (among other things) but I'm pretty sure it's all symlink stuff.
check if you have libtiff5 installed

sudo pacman -S libtiff5

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libbrotlidec.so.1.* /usr/lib/libbrotlidec.so.1
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.so /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so /usr/lib/libtiff.so.5
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.so /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2

then set compatibility to Legacy Runtime 1.0

I hope at the very least I set you all in the right direction with this if it didn't work.

[Duffydan26]

Originally posted by Floreum:

I got it working on CachyOS. First things first you gotta set the compatibility to Legacy Runtime 1.0.
I ran a bunch of things so I'm not 100% sure what made it finally work, but it needs to be using that compatibility mode.

I'm certain it has to do with the libraries not knowing where to look like in previous versions. This may or may not work for you, I suggest opening steam via the terminal and then launching SP and feeding OpenAI or Claude the error, that was the only way I could figure out how to get it to work, bring up you might need to symlink some files so it hopefully gets to the point faster.

But this is what they got me to run. (among other things) but I'm pretty sure it's all symlink stuff.
check if you have libtiff5 installed

sudo pacman -S libtiff5

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libbrotlidec.so.1.* /usr/lib/libbrotlidec.so.1
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.so /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so /usr/lib/libtiff.so.5
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.so /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2

then set compatibility to Legacy Runtime 1.0

I hope at the very least I set you all in the right direction with this if it didn't work.

Your SP doesn't crash when attempting to apply some of the basic materials to a model?

[Floreum]

Originally posted by Duffydan26:

Originally posted by Floreum:

I got it working on CachyOS. First things first you gotta set the compatibility to Legacy Runtime 1.0.
I ran a bunch of things so I'm not 100% sure what made it finally work, but it needs to be using that compatibility mode.

I'm certain it has to do with the libraries not knowing where to look like in previous versions. This may or may not work for you, I suggest opening steam via the terminal and then launching SP and feeding OpenAI or Claude the error, that was the only way I could figure out how to get it to work, bring up you might need to symlink some files so it hopefully gets to the point faster.

But this is what they got me to run. (among other things) but I'm pretty sure it's all symlink stuff.
check if you have libtiff5 installed

sudo pacman -S libtiff5

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libbrotlidec.so.1.* /usr/lib/libbrotlidec.so.1
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.so /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so /usr/lib/libtiff.so.5
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libxml2.so /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2

then set compatibility to Legacy Runtime 1.0

I hope at the very least I set you all in the right direction with this if it didn't work.

Your SP doesn't crash when attempting to apply some of the basic materials to a model?

I didn't really have any time to do any extensive testing, I just loaded up a project with 10 UDIMs to sorta stress test it, and it seemed to run well until I bumped the resolution from 2k to 4k, then it just hung up loading the folder I turned on, though I could move the UI still.

Maybe it was a fluke, or maybe the Legacy Runtime has its own problems. I don't really know right now what exactly these compatibility modes are doing and why it works after doing the symlinks I did. Maybe someone smarter than me can figure out why it doesn't work using the default mode and how to fix it.

I do hope to fully switch to Linux one day.

[zeik_tuvai]

I'm running 2025 on Nobara Linux, had to do the symlink for libtiff.so.5 and also switched it to using legacy runtime 1.0 and its been working pretty stable. I have a cintiq 24 and it works perfectly out of the box, pressure sensitivity works as I would expect.

I tried 2026 today and setting compatibility to legacy runtime 1.0 got it to launch, but right now every time I undo anything at all the application crashes. So I'm sticking with 2025 for right now.