Yes, I got the designer to open on that version of Ubuntu. (Ignition 8.1.25, btw).
As per the user manual:
Note:
Depending on your flavor of Linux, you may not have the launch option. In this case, your .desktop files will not be supported and you'll need to place the designerlauncher.desktop file in one of the following directories to satisfy Linux permissions and execute.
- /usr/share/applications/
- /usr/local/share/applications/
- ~/.local/share/applications/
So I copied the two folders and desktop file from /Downloads to /usr/share/applications, and then used gtk-launch to start the desktop file running from CLI.