The inability to use Adobe Creative Cloud on Linux is often cited as a major barrier for many users considering a switch to the platform. But perhaps, just perhaps, there has already been a breakthrough in that direction.
A community developer says they have resolved long-standing Wine compatibility issues that prevented Adobe Creative Cloud installers from completing on Linux, publishing a patchset and prebuilt binaries that they claim enable installation of Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025.
…but why?
I guess if you have a ton of adobe specific assets and must be able to use adobe software because of legacy projects this might be useful but it just feels like tech debt.
coupled with the fact that tons of accessible software now can open psd and ai filetypes… :| hooray, I guess?
but for fuck’s sake people get off the creative cloud it’s turning into ai smog
This would have been great like 10 years ago before Adobe fucked a decent product up with a subscription model and AI.
The good news is the old, non-subscription versions do work in Linux.
Honestly, unless you make a shitload of money off it, subscription Adobe products are just too rich for my blood.
Would like to see some confirmation, but this is probably the #1 thing I see people say is holding them back.
Every day people, no. Mainly Youtubers.
In hindsight, I’m so glad I couldn’t get them working on linux, because it forced me to get my head around Darktable. I couldn’t go back to Lightroom now…
Honestly I feel like that’s very common with Linux. If you’re willing to deal with the growing pain of switching it ends up working out better in the end, some people just don’t want to deal with that or it’s their job and they can’t afford to deal with that. I’m sympathetic to the latter case, less to the former but that’s just my opinion
I was one of the former. Photography isn’t my job, but it’s really important to me, and photo editing was a show stopper for me for a long time. Even after I moved to Linux full time, I was using remote desktops, VMs and whatever else I could manage to get Adobe stuff working, without having to switch back to Windows. I endured, because I’d finally hit a threshold where that pain was worth putting up with in preference to Windows and its built in ads and spyware.
But when I finally gave up on getting Lightroom working on linux, I figured I had no choice but to learn a linux compatible workflow… It was either that, or go back to windows, and that wasn’t happening…
That was exaclty me like three years ago now. I stopped editing photos for like a year because I got so fed up with windows and did the switch cold turkey. No idea why it took me so long to just watch a few workflow videos on darktable but I use it constantly now I feel like I could do better but I’m comfortable
I found darktable pretty user friendly TBH. The thing I’ve been struggling with is image editing - I can’t find something that has a decent workflow. I’m not looking for anything fancy. Paint.net on windows more than met my needs when I was spending more time in windows.
Thanks a lot for the suggestions, I’ll have to check Pinta out.
Would Pixi editor be the kind of thing you’re looking for?
I will give it a try, thanks for the suggestion.
My biggest issue with darktable was the masking. It’s so different in darktable, but once I understood it, all the barriers fell away
I can’t find something that has a decent workflow. I’m not looking for anything fancy
I import, sort and tag my photos with Digikam, and then open them with darktable for editing.
Sorry, I meant a decent editing workflow. Things along the lines of editing - adding outlined text, moving and/or removing things, etc. For example, I’ve tried gimp a few times but I’ve found myself fighting against the way it wants you to do things.
Any reason why you are using digikam for importing and sorting and not just daktable?
Digikam is built from the ground up to be a photo cataloger. Hierarchical tags that you can click on to expand or contract, the ability to jump from a given photo to all photos taken on the same date, or all photos in the same folder, or all photos that share a particular tag. Collapsible folders and tag structures, the ability to toggle child tag/folder recursive view on or off, image grouping (automated by filename/timestamp/burst). They also share metadata perfectly well through EXIF data, so anything I do in one is visible in the other right away.
This is digikam
This is the same folder in darktable
I find the catalogue more convenient in digikam, but it might be because I’ve used it since the beginning.
Lightroom for me, although it is more than just the installer that breaks it.
Their dumb installer is a web app incorrectly displayed under wine. If you install an Adobe program in a virtual machine then copy its files not every programs work. Like Premiere doesn’t work but Photoshop and Audition seems to work.
This should be applicable to “alternatively sourced” PS installs too then?
alternatively sourced
I think old versions pre-adobe cloud have been working pretty well for a long time, IIRC. It’s really the latest versions that most companies force employees to use that are messed up.
But Adobe cloud is, like, 12 years old now IIRC so you’d have to be using a pretty old version.
CS 6 still works just fine
Still haven’t gotten After Effects working in wine. Everything else that I use from my master collection works well though.
no fucking way
It could take a while to get into Wine. The test suite is pretty extensive and automated but patches can break things as well as new tests may need to be developed to ensure that testing is accurate.
Yeah, there isnt even a merge request upstream yet and it seems like no tests have been added, which I’m sure will be required before merge.
They did release a binary of their fork, and you can always build it yourself as well.
