P: Provide support for Linux

Count me in.

But until Adobe decides to get around to supporting Linux, there is darktable and Bibble to take away from Adobe's potential profits.

yeah, I'd say it's a problem that probably needs to be attacked from both angles: Lightroom gets tweaked to run better under wine, and wine gets tweaked to run Lightroom better.

Yes, I would go along with this; although I am not sure tweaking LR is the correct way to go about it. Putting some resource into wine (or codeweavers) might give a better graphics face for all their apps - and there must be many of us who would like to be able to run an up to date CS5 (or, according to rumours I read on the French Alpha sites, CS6) in wine/Crossover.

M

Nigel

One other thing I forgot: your LR plugins won't work in Bibble. The plugins page at bibblelabs will tell you which plugins you CAN get, although those by Thomas Baruchel seem to have fallen off the web,

M

I'm in the same boat as most posters here. I run Linux exclusively (home and work, desktops and servers). At work I have to run Windows in a virtual machine for some business requirements. At home I have to run Windows in a VM for Lightroom. It's the only program I ever run in that VM, and if I could run it in Linux, I'd dump Windows entirely.

BTW, I have gotten Lightroom running under wine, but the graphics performance leaves a *lot* to be desired. I think that if Adobe were to concentrate its efforts on tweaking LR for wine instead of porting it outright, they'd have better luck. (This is what Google did with Picasa--on Linux it's a Windows executable running under wine and packaged so you don't notice.)

First thing to say is that you need to check the camera support ... including the announcement in the forums regarding the release candidate for 5.2.3 - the latest Sony DSLT and Nex-5N but not AFAIK the NEX7.

I bought a manual on handling RAW, because I felt that my previous methods (developed when I used to use PSE on the JPEG that came out of my Coolpix 990) were not methodical enough. This highlights two areas you should consider before jumping from LR to bibble. The first is that (in my understanding) LR has a slider control for brightness (the manual was in French, but the word the author used was luminosity - as opposed to luminance) as well as for exposure. In bibble you can control brightness by playing with the input/output sliders on the Curves control - if you know gimp you would be familiar with these. Secondly, LR seems to have an edges preview for sharpening (I confess I read about this, but having already decided against LR in VM, my knowledge remains entirely theoretical). Bibble does not have this.

One last observation. Although LR can be used as a standalone product, it does seem as though it was developed to go hand in hand with Photoshop. That would allow you to stay in 16-bit. You can't do that with the current release of gimp.

Now I have dealt with the negatives, the fundamentals of RAW development to JPEG or TIFF are very good. To the naked eye, with no stopwatch, they seem faster than the virtualised LR. The batch application of a set of adjustments seems at least as good as anything I could do with LR. But anyone who is coming from the LR side could well find the opposite.

Bottom line: you get a 30 day trial on any of the platforms (XP, Vista, W7, OsX, and Lx) and you can make up your own mind.

HTH

M

"A poor business model? With such arguments everybody should develop exclusively for Windows then! Let's forget about Mac and Linux, Windows is more than 90% of the market. Great argument! "

Actually, that is a good argument and it's why many applications are Windows-only. However, the photography/graphics arts/animation and so on communities tend to be disproportionately Apple relative to the general population - more like 50/50 or so. Given that, it makes perfect sense that Adobe would take the effort to provide Mac versions. However, as you can see by all the Lion-related threads, there is a cost to doing that. One might assume a similar cost for Linux support.

Probably the wrong place but...How would you compare Bibble5's feature set and workflow to Lr? This is the first I've heard of it and I briefly checked out the page, but my mind is always thinking "but you know how to do everything in Lr"...

The whole point of my posting further down is that there are two sources of additional revenue from making a Linux version of any product. Firstly, people such as myself who aren't prepared to buy the product and run it in a VM - the same goes for PSE, by the way, and there may be people who would buy CS5 ...

Secondly, there are people, such as myself, who are prepared to pay for an expensive version of a software license so as to ensure ongoing compatibility of the purchased product with whatever computing platform (physical machine, as well as OS: you get to run bibble5 on all your machines, as long as you only use one of them at once). I bought the pro license for VueScan for the same reason.

But in the end, Adobe has a duty to its stockholders to maximise its profits by investing in versions and products that will likely be profitable. All we can do in this forum is to provide some evidence that there would be a real income stream.

A poor business model? With such arguments everybody should develop exclusively for Windows then! Let's forget about Mac and Linux, Windows is more than 90% of the market. Great argument!

And BTW, why do we have cars in Red, Green, Blue, Marron or whatever, let's have only Black cars. That's costing a lot to have multiple line of color.

And why...

No seriously! Some people not using Lightroom today will probably be tempted to buy it if they are using GNU/Linux daily.