Running Clip Studio Paint in Wine on Linux

I would love it if Celsys released a Linux version of their Clip Studio apps, but I highly doubt that will ever happen.  Though if it did it would go a long way toward me being able to ditch both macOS and Windows (at least for my personal projects).  So, without a native Linux version what to do?  Try to run it in Wine (read more about Wine here).  Emphasis on the word "try" because it can be rather difficult to get programs to actually work in Wine.  They have an App Database which can often help you decide if it's even worth the trouble, which it often is not.

Well, with that stellar sales pitch I'll tell you that Clip Studio Paint 1.9.7 and Clip Studio Modeler 1.9.1 both worked for me in Wine 3.0.1 and Wine 4.0.3 on Kubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS.  You should see similar results with just about any Linux distribution, especially the Debian-based ones like Ubuntu and its derivatives.  I only installed the "trial" versions, but I tested as much as I could and everything I tested seemed to work just like it does on my Windows 10 machine.

Clip Studio Paint 1.9.7 running in Kubuntu Linux 18.04.  As you can see the 3D features also work.

However, I would strongly recommend if you have an actual Windows machine, or if you have a copy of Windows you can install on a partition on your machine and dual boot, that would be the preferable solution.  But let's say you don't have a copy of Windows, or you hate it with passion, or you're not sure you'll use Clip Studio often enough to dedicate a drive partition to it.  Ok then, let's install Wine and configure it for running the Clip Studio apps...

Install WINE

1. Open whatever package manager your distribution uses and search for "Wine" and mark it for installation along with whatever dependencies it needs.  

Sometimes the version available in your distro's repo is really old, in which case you'll want to add the Wine repository as a new source and pull it directly from there.  I'm using Wine 3.0.1 (the latest in my Kubuntu LTS repo), though 4.0.3 is the latest stable release available from Wine HQ.  

However, having the latest release isn't always an advantage with Wine, you'll want to check the app database to see if your particular application(s) are listed and what success or problems others have reported.

Note that you can also install the Wine HQ Release Key and Repository source using the Terminal (this would be for my Kubuntu 18.04 LTS install, but any Debian-based distro would be similar):

wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key

sudo apt-key add winehq.key

sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main'

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install —install-reccommends winehq-staging

This will allow you to easily install the latest stable or development releases, as well as force previous versions if that's what you need.

Another reason you may want to use the official Wine HQ repo is for reasons I don't know some of the ones in the Ubuntu repos were missing the Wine Gecko and Wine Mono components, which I had to download separately and manually install.  The one from the official Wine repo was complete.

As I said in the intro, I did test this with both Wine 3.0.1 and 4.0.3 and it worked in both of them, and should presumably also work in all the versions in between.

Install WineTricks

2. Install WineTricks from your package manager, along with whatever dependencies it has.

3. Make sure "cabextract" is installed.  If it's not, install it with your package manager.

Install DLLs Clip Studio Needs

4. Run WineTricks and make sure the radio button for Default Wine Prefix is selected and click OK.

5. Select "Install a Windows DLL or component" and click OK.

6. One by one, in the order they are listed install:

vcrun2005

vcrun2008

vcrun2010

vcrun2012

vcrun2013

vcrun2015 or vcrun2017 (you can't have both, I'd recommend 2017)

vcrun6

vcrun6sp6

msxml4

msxml6

mfc40

mfc42

I honestly don't know if all of those are actually necessary but they were the ones listed in the Linux Mint forum post I found that pointed me in the right direction and it shouldn't hurt anything to install all of them.  If any of them do conflict with your running some other software in Wine you can always use Wine Config to create a custom profile just for that app that excludes the problematic one(s).

Install the Clip Studio App(s)

7. Download and run the Windows installer for Clip Studio Paint.  Note that the shortcut icons on your desktop may show the Wine icon instead of the app.  This is because it actually has to run Wine first.  You can edit the shortcut and assign the correct icon to it under the right+click context menu —> Properties though it may correct itself after a reboot.

8. (optional) Download and run the Windows installer for Clip Studio Modeler if you want to set up 3D objects and characters.  This download will also install the Clip Studio materials management app, which does NOT completely work (see below).

9. Try to open and run each of the Clip Studio apps to make sure they actually work.  If the desktop icons placed during installation don't work use Wine's file "Explorer" to navigate to your fake "C:" drive and drill down to the:

"Program Files (x86)" folder → CELSYS → CLIP STUDIO 1.5 → CLIP STUDIO PAINT → CLIPStudioPaint.exe  

Wine has a file Explorer like old-school Windows

If it crashes or freezes instead of running you probably need to change the Windows version in the Wine Config to Windows XP.

Clip Studio Modeler 1.9.1 running in Kubuntu Linux 18.04.  As you can see the 3D setup functions appear to work.

Configure Your Tablet

10. If you have a Wacom tablet and are using KDE as your desktop environment, they have a Wacom Tablet preference panel you can install from Discover (it's sort of like KDE's App Store), but no guarantees it actually works.  If you have some other kind of graphics tablet and it doesn't have a Linux driver (since most don't) you can try installing the generic "Graphics Tablet" app for system settings.  Again, no guarantees it will work.  Getting your graphics table to work, and particularly trying to get pressure sensitivity to work, can be a real bear on Linux.  For example, XP-Pen graphics and display tablets actually do have a native Linux driver available, but you have to run it with "sudo" from a terminal and keep the control panel open in the background (it doesn't appear to be persistent).  YMMV.

Problems Encountered

1. The desktop shortcuts created by Wine don't always open the apps or take such a long time to open them you think it didn't work.  They're far more likely to work if you already have something open in Wine (like the Config utility or Explorer).  Similarly, the links in the Clip Studio app sidebar don't always work for launching Paint and Modeler either.  Sometimes they do, sometimes there's a lag in Wine and they fail to open.  It's far more reliable to navigate with Wine's Explorer app and open the EXE files directly.

2. If you are using Wine 3.x you MUST set Wine Config to "Windows XP" which will trigger an "unsupported OS" warning when you open the Clip Studio apps, but they will work anyway.  If you select any Windows version later than XP you will have problems.  For example, on my system Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 would let the program run, but the canvas would be blank instead of white.  Window 10 would cause a page fault on startup and crash the program.  In Wine 4.x you can set it to Windows XP, 7, 8, or 8.1 but it will page fault if you set it to Windows 10.

3. The CLIP Studio management app does not work properly.  It relies heavily on loading HTML content both from remote servers and a local folder.  The web code uses CSS3 querySelectorAll and the Wine implementation of the mshtml.dll is too old to support it, so the web content fails to load (which is most of the app).  If you have a CLIP account, you should manage it through your web browser instead because you can't do it from this app.  So what does work?  Well, you can use it for maintenance on your Materials and Work folders.  In fact, because the interface is broken, the ONLY way you can get to the management sections for Work or Materials is to first do a Gear → Maintenance → Organize Work Tags / Organize Materials Folders.  At the end of those relatively fast operations it will take you to the management subsections.  You can also use the app to download the large package of Materials when you first run it.

The Clip Studio Assets Management app running in Kubuntu Linux 18.04 (Notice that a LOT of it does NOT load!)

4. Be wary of updates!  An update to the Clip Studio apps, an update to Wine, or an update to any shared Linux library could break the whole thing.  Running apps in Wine is often a fragile balancing act.  When a new update comes along for the Clip Apps you should RENAME your existing "CLIP STUDIO 1.5" folder to something else, like maybe the actual version number (in my case "CLIP STUDIO 1.9") and then install the update, which will create a NEW "CLIP STUDIO 1.5" folder.  That way if the new version doesn't work under Wine you can simply run the previous version without having to reinstall it.

5. Pressure sensitivity can be difficult if not impossible to get working in Wine.  Odds are you will not get it to work, so you'll have to live with fixed pen and brush sizes.  If you don't usually use variable line widths anyway this won't be a problem, but in Wine most graphics tablets only work in "mouse mode."  Also, even if you get pressure sensitivity to work in one program in Wine that doesn't mean it will work in another program.  Recent releases of Wine are supposed to have improved graphics tablet detection, but it's still pretty buggy.

6. It should probably also go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: don't expect any technical support from Celsys if you're running their software in Wine.  For any problems you encounter you're far more likely to find your answers in a Wine or Linux forum anyway.

If you can't live with all this uncertainty then you should probably run Clip Studio in a Virtual Machine running actual Windows (though if you have a copy of Windows you'd be even better off just running a dual-boot set-up to run Clip Studio in Windows directly on your actual hardware).