Adobe, Linux Support, and the Linux Foundation.

[gai.ra.III]

While generally I've only lurked the Adobe forums I've finally worked up guts to post this. I also know that about every 1-2 months this question is asked but I think it deserves a another go around.

My premises is this:

Adobe joined the Linux Foundation in 2008 for a focus on Linux for Web 2.0  Applications like Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR™. Currently Adobe holds a silver membership status with the Linux Foundation. So why in the world do they not have any Creative Cloud Programs available in Linux without the need for WINE and other such workarounds. I think it's a sucky move to support the Linux Foundation and use Linux in the back-end while not doing anything to support actual Linux users who have for at least a decade requested Adobe desktop products on Linux. Sure it's going to take a lot of manpower, financial resources, etc. But to truly support Linux and the Linux Foundation I think it's necessary that y'all do make things like Photoshop and Lightroom available for the Linux desktop. In any regards the wider Linux community would most likely help with testing and debugging programs. We're used to it.

[filmographie]

There is only one significant hurdle to switching the desktops of ALL our users to Linux - Adobe Creative Suite!

Why would we want to move away from Windows or Mac?  For us it is really about locking down user interactions and creating stable desktops. With Linux we can deploy standard solutions that reduce our risk profile. Some people think that Linux saves $$, but that is like saying that an electric car is cheaper than a conventional car - it neglects the infrastructure and purchase costs while focusing totally on the drive time costs.

[zimney]

How many Linux users would it take for Adobe to create a Linux version of CC? Is that even the issue or are there other reasons preventing Adobe? In short, what can the Linux community do to help make this happen?

[filmographie]

It might make more sense for Adobe to just make their apps Wine compatible and avoid the issue completely - some older versions of Adobe products already run under Wine without difficulty, others are broke in that respect. Jump over the the discussion at https://forums.adobe.com/message/4302334

There is a version compatibility list  at https://appdb.winehq.org/ that shows several Adobe products running with "minor problems". I've tried running Adobe products under Wine in the past and got wildly weird results - some of which were not minor.

The underlying hardware related code is no longer an issue now that MacOS runs on Intel - much of the assembly level code is probably already interchangeable.

[mytaxsite]

How many Linux users would it take for Adobe to create a Linux

version of CC?

Certainly not the 5 usual suspects you see hanging around here.

[TZiady]

Only adobe can answer that. And I am sure they are a great coding house, but I would bet they would need a little more then the 5 lurkers here. LOL...

[Siskulous]

Quite a lot, apparently. The getsatisfaction thread they linked at the beginning of this thread has over 15,000 followers. That would be far more than enough to catch the attention of most companies.

[filmographie]

I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but it is a multiplicative effect. Something like: for every active person who posts there might be 100 people who just watch the flow of discussion, 1,000 who share the sentiment but don't actually visit the forum and 10,000 who might ultimately be impacted..

[TZiady]

Completely agree. We are talking about people adopting. Here is the thing, people like myself will have either dual boot or a home machine that the family uses that's running windblows and use CC on it. However, let's look at the numbers.

Assume makes on average about $500.00 per cc user.

Also, let's assume 100% of supposed 15k will bite.

That's about 7.5 million the first year. No problem at all. Makes perfect business sense.

However, let's assume only 10% adopt (which I am sure Adobe has more research than myself; but, persons like myself that have already a cc account would just reactivate it on Linux, and people that aren't really about to pay the $500 yearly cost for the products. Perhaps only get membership on single app basis as needed. Just saying.

So @ 10% that 15k is generating about $750,000.00

Also, assume Adobe needed 15 new Linux developers.

Each would average a 50k salary and you are down to 0 profit.

And considering Adobe is an enterprise and they are not in the habit of hiring and firing; these would most likely be benefited and continue to work after the first year.

The numbers don't make sense to me and I know very little about business and clearly wouldn't make sense to Adobe either. It is a dead horse and we keep beating it.

T

[filmographie]

It is for sure that the graphic design business is dominated by Mac OS and that isn't going to change in the near future.

But let's just focus on the film biz for a moment - Linux is pretty common amongst VFX shops. Eyeon (Fusion - a competitor to After Effects and just acquired by Blackmagic) made a big effort to get their products to run using Wine several years ago. A lot of the Hollywood shops have switched from competing products in recent years - did that decision have anything to do with Linux compatibility? As I recall at least one shop (was it Digital Domain?) went so far as to actively contribute to an open source VFX project as a means of reducing their render node licensing costs. Specialty software (Massive was built at WETA to solve a problem with the Lord of the Rings) has long been built by large studios. The ILM/Lucasfilm/Pixar core VFX & animation technologies were all designed and built in house, then seeded a host of commercial products - some of which made their way back into the studios.

For all the hype Apple made with their Final Cut products, Hollywood shops remain overwhelmingly Avid based. Adobe's Premiere product competes mostly in the non-Hollywood market segment against FC, Vegas, etc. as well as Avid. Linux video editing still seems to be something confined to the university environment, where several open source projects have been developed - whether due to the lack of commercially available products or as a result of student projects that caught on.

Linux users also benefit from the longstanding publishing demands of the university environment. My first encounter with publishing was nroff/troff some 30 years ago on a BSD unix platform. As a student you tend not to think about how expensive that PDP-11/70 and Xerox printer combo really was - in reality the Macintosh and HP/Apple Laser printer were a far cheaper combination. Pagemaker was the right product at the right time for the business community. Point is that all those old unix tools still work in Linux, GIMP can do just about everything Photoshop can do, etc., etc. and so forth.

So is Linux a viable market? Did most of the Adobe developers cut their teeth on Linux/Unix/BSD systems in college?

[TZiady]

Cutting your teeth on BSD and other *nix like environments doesn't make you a developer for those platforms. Reason those platforms worked well in Universities is that the student free labor was available to develop the programs and the cheap reuse of the products certainly beats Micro$loth / Apple enterprise solutions particularly back in my day (late 80s into early 90s). Anyway, for true video development particularly in universities and non-profit space, Linux is the winner; however, I am sure all professional houses actually have windblows boxes now. So, unless Adobe (which I think is what you are suggesting?) wants to attract people in the industry when they are young (sort of like what Apple tried unsuccessfully with student populations with apples for student program and sweet pricing points on apple hardware / software for colleges) this might not be a great good reason as it has been shown over and over again, except for students that start their own projects / businesses out of college, they will use whatever they are given by their employer. And if their employers has any mild rate of success; they will be able to spend the extra 2k to have a really nice windblows box laying around. More and more people are using Linux for different reasons here and there. As a code developer, I love and have invaluable tools on Linux; however, I would bet that the majority of people (not in technology) using Linux is because of the added attractiveness of a free OS and mostly free apps. I would love CC on my Android Tablets and Linux boxes can very easily emulate those. Actually, that might be the real ticket. Does CC support Apple IOS solutions?

[filmographie]

Recent news is that many of the open source projects have fizzled out due to lack of participation. Not a new story - it was always harder to convince a bunch of other people to work on something unknown that to do it yourself.

I agree that cutting your teeth on *nix doesn't make you a developer - only time tears and sweat can do that.

The fundamental equations for image manipulation are really simple and old hat these days. Most of a developers time is spent in the GUI world trying to make things look & feel consistent while paying lip service to clean codebase security.

Personally I think that the attractiveness of Linux is stability. I can (and am currently doing so as this is written) update the kernel of a server and use the same tools I learned to use 10 or 20 years ago.  With Window$ I'd have to relearn the entire admin toolkit every time a new release comes out (and I did so from NT 3.1 until Windows Server 2003 - don't get me started on Winserver 2013 (pay someone else to deal with that mess)).

I stumbled across something from Adobe recently that looked like it might have a tablet in mind, but can't remember the context.

[discosoc]

I know this is a dead horse, but I just wanted to voice my opinion as well.  A Linux client would be nice.  I recently signed up for CC Photoshop, and was pleased with the cost and features.  Unfortunately, the hassle of dual-booting just for one program has meant I do more and more work in GIMP instead.

[TZiady]

I agree. And as filmographie points, I just am testing out Windblows 10 on my only windows system. Lol. Yeah, nightmare and no stability. Gets better quickly; however, I would love to have CHiP promise from back in the day. Hardware doesn't matter, all system hardware virtualization and you can run 30 OS's on top of a hardware ROM system. This was talked about back in the mid 90s. Reboots would take seconds and file space would be shared between any number of OS's you may be running and hardware would be easy to use from any brand / platform you could run any OS. Yeah, Apple and Micro$loth shot that horse really quickly. However, the technology is out there to do some amazing things; just need some deep pockets to support and propel the ideas. If I can have PS, Code CC, dreamweaver, and adobe suite in Linux; I would be in heaven and never use anything other than for the rest of my life except for customer deployments and such.

[brunnerdan]

We also need ADE on Linux. As someone already said, if it's working on OS/X, why not on Linux ?

[filmographie]

Just remember that over 90% of the work on a software product is directly related to the GUI and interface to the OS. That means only 10% of the code does the actual work advertised by the program. (I found this out when we took a program from DOS to Windows 3.0 - in DOS every line of code actually "did something" - in Windows most of the code was about where something was going to be placed, what colors, etc.)

Since the Mac and Windows environments have well defined system routines much of the grunt work is handed off to these embedded tools. Some of the problems with a stable Linux implementation might be related to the varying flavors of KDE, Gnome, X-Windows etc. present on any given Linux desktop. Wine is supposed to transparently overcome these issues, but it does not cover every quirky shortcut or undocumented feature used by a native app programmer. This is why Excel users will NEVER be satisfied using Libre or Open Office. The Microsoft Office programming team has always used undocumented features of the Windows environment knowing that this would insure product lock-in.

[Vadym]

How much can you talk about it?

Download Google Web Designer. Works in Ubuntu, and other systems!

Animations + Web development:

http://www.google.com/webdesigner/

[Xeon64]

Here is an idea. Adobe makes their own OS based on Linux and that solves the Interface problem. Adobe could make their Linux custom taylored for their software. It would be the ultimate design workstation.

[Xeon64]

Apparently Adobe has not interest in Linux at all anymore since the just dropped support for Acrobat Reader for Linux.

[Siskulous]

Xeon64 wrote:

Apparently Adobe has not interest in Linux at all anymore since the just dropped support for Acrobat Reader for Linux.

To be fair I don't know any Linux users who actually use Acrobat Reader. Linux has lots of PDF readers that work as well or better than the Linux version of Reader, and most popular DEs have one of them baked in. Flash Player is probably a better product to look at if you want to gauge Adobe's interest in Linux. It actually gets a reasonable amount of use on the Linux desktop.

[filmographie]

Not really surprising that Flash Player would be supported on all platforms as it is used by companies like Fox News who want to control file based streaming content to hide the file location for direct linking. Wouldn't want anyone to sidestep an opportunity for ad revenue, would we? It wouldn't surprise me either to find that some of those companies actually pay Adobe in some way for the inclusion of those features.

[Guest]

I want this!

[filmographie]

It isn't going to happen anytime soon - the programmers are way too busy with bug fixes.

[RGTV]

No doubt. Premiere Pro alone has been buggy enough on OSX and Windows since the 2014 release that an official Linux release wouldn't be doing anybody a favor.

[TysonB]

Xeon64 wrote:

Here is an idea. Adobe makes their own OS based on Linux and that solves the Interface problem. Adobe could make their Linux custom taylored for their software. It would be the ultimate design workstation.

That... would be... actually, quite fantastic.

[filmographie]

That might work if Adobe contracted with a major Linux vendor (like Red Hat or SUSE) to take care of the security issues. I suspect that the Adobe programmers have been so busy working on bug fixes that Marketing is always gnashing their teeth. This might be why they shifted to the Creative Cloud concept - so upgrades could be released incrementally and debugged as part of an ongoing process rather than the old way where a major upgrade happened all at once and programmers spent the next year doing nothing but fixing bugs from that event.