This would have been great like 10 years ago before Adobe fucked a decent product up with a subscription model and AI.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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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...
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.
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
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.