P: Provide support for Linux

Those of you pointing out that you have purchased windows simply to run Lightroom and other adobe products, or that you maintain such a system for that purpose, may be hurting the case for Lightroom on Linux rather than helping it.

Lightroom licenses are multiplatform. When you buy Lightroom you're free to use it on Mac or Windows. Assuming that Linux will not be a paid addition, that means that for Adobe to make money by supporting Lightroom on Linux there would have to be people out there who currently use only Linux and therefore have not purchased Lightroom. If you've already bought Lightroom and are using it on a Windows/Mac system you begrudgingly maintain for that purpose you unfortunately do not represent any additional business for Adobe.

Personally, I would like to switch entirely over to Linux and Lightroom is one thing, possibly the only thing, that holds me back. I have not upgraded from LR3 to LR4 yet, even though 4 has some excellent new features. However, if Linux support were included in LR4 I would surely upgrade.

First : Not only Linux users like free stuff...

Sure, I am on another platform for my photos, but not my own free will. I upgrade my box every 2 years, dedicated to photos. The best of having Lightroom on Linux is for my related to storage and hardware. I can have a file system that is open and hard-drives that are accessible on other computers. Try that with the propriety filesystem of Mac-OS (Windows I don't know after their 'fat' filesystem).

I guess there will me more photogs that will go for Linux if Lightroom is available. You get a lot of stuff for free ;-), you can pick your own hardware, build redundant servers, connect secure to the Internet.

It would be very competitive.

We can have right or wrong, each of us believe in its opinion. The only truth is: we really know the answer after try it !

Unlikely, IMHO. First, Linux users like free stuff. Second, most of them that would be users are already users on other platforms. Combine that with the low single digit percentages of Linux deployment and you have very little market, in my opinion.

This topic is in the top 10 idea (sort popular) and in the top 3 in terms of participating people (# of reply). I think this is sufficient to prove that there is a real important market for.

Right! But I fear Adobe still sees Linux users as poor hackers, young and stupid people, this is really what makes me sad and frustrated! I'm not a pro photographer but I do lot of work on photography. I'm also a Lightroom teacher for my photo club in France. It just happen that I'm working on GNU/Linux and I'm fed up having to reboot on Windows just to do some work on my pictures.

Why I'm winning on this forum some would ask?

Because there is no equivalent to Lightroom on Linux!

Strange enough, there is more support for movies on Linux than photography. I've also invest years on Lightroom so cannot really move away easily.

So please Adobe, do something for us, Linux users.

I've probably helped you gaining more than 50 users by teaching and recommending Lightroom to many people! No kidding.

Be the only serious solution on 1,5% of the market (Linux) is certainly quite as good as to be in a very competitive 6% of the market share (OSX).

Same here... I need a Unix-like system, but I also needed Photoshop (this was pre-Lightroom), so instead of building a PC myself and running Linux, which I wanted to do, I overpaid for an under-performing iMac. I would have gladly bought/built a more reasonably priced PC, and passed the savings on to Adobe.

I, too, would like to see the data on "Linux users are not willing to pay for software." It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem, right? The software for which good free alternatives exist, we won't pay for (why would we?). But the software that doesn't run on Linux... how can you know what we are willing to pay? And you aren't marketing to the average Linux user here---these are serious to professional photographers, who have likely already sunk so much money into camera gear, lenses, lighting, books, prints, etc. I know that personally, I wouldn't consider a LR license as coming out of my software budget (which is perhaps under-funded), but rather my photography budget (which gets as much money as I can throw at it while still feeding my family).

Same goes with "the Linux user base is small." Yes, we are small, but so many people are held back from using Linux because of a few key pieces of software, and everything from Adobe is pretty high on the list (along with some high-profile games). I suppose some company has to be brave and be the first to treat Linux users as first class citizens. Thank you, Valve.

I know, and you've right. What I mean is, for example if I look at myself :
– I need to my linux running even when I use LR, all my other tools are under linux (ftp, mail etc...) ; so I would'nt consider any dual boot solution.
– My quite old laptop with a XP licence is not enough powerful to handle LR.

So, I bought a tower PC assembling by myself with a large screen and a win7 64 licence, especially for LR.

Alban,
You have to buy a PC even if you use a Linux. 😃 Moreover, if you buy a laptop usually you will get an OEM OS license. I know that there are laptops with Ubuntu of FreeDOS preinstalled, but unfortunately there are much more without such an option.