P: Provide support for Linux

Report · Apr 26, 2011

Lightroom for Linux - is it possible? Most my friends and I need it, because of not using Windows and current Linux tools can't get so great instruments for raw preprocessing and organizing...

Report · May 23, 2014

I know that porting Lightroom to Linux is only the first step. Debugging and supporting it on Linux might be more difficult than on Windows or MacOS X because there are so many versions of Linux. But it certainly can be done, there is commercial software available for Linux like Mathematica and many others and nowadays even an ever growing number of games is available for Linux because of Steam.

I do actually use Lightroom professionally. My main job is developing software, but I sell photos on various stock photography sites and earn some money with it. I would even be willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for a Linux version of Lightroom, even though I already have the Windows / MacOS X version because I think it is annoying to have a Linux / Windows dual-boot system or run Lightroom in a virtual machine.

I don't know if Lightroom is the best RAW converter because I don't know the alternatives. I personally like Lightroom and would love to have it on Linux. But on the other hand, maybe the alternatives that are available for Linux are good enough and I can live with one of them. So far I did not check them out because it is lots of work to get accustomed to new software. But on the other hand it would save me lots of time because I don't have to boot up a virtual machine to get my work done (or boot into Windows on a dual-boot system which is even worse).

I think porting Lightroom to Linux would not be a huge financial risk. I don't know how much it would cost, but lets do guessing: maybe you need five software developers to work on it for half a year and a software developer earns 100.000$ a year. Then it costs you about 250.000$ to do it. I'll be conservative, so lets assume it costs 500.000$ Not that much money for a big company like Adobe. Lightroom costs about 100$, thus they need 5000 new customers to at least not lose money. Well, you need to support it, debug problems etc. which also costs money. So maybe they need 10.000 or 20.000 to at least not lose money. There are not that many Linux Desktop Users, but ten or twenty thousand of them buying Lightroom is not completely unreasonable.

But if Adobe does not port Lightroom to Linux, Linux users will use something else, either a commercial offering like Aftershot Pro 2 or an open-source offering like Raw Therapee and DarkTable. These offerings probably get better with time and at some point they are probably good enough for most people and at point, Adobe probably lost these (potential) customers forever. And they might tell their friends and they might lose these customers as well. I will certainly start to try out alternatives to Lightroom because I don't think Adobe will port Lightroom to Linux and I don't want to use virtual machines just to run Lightroom forever.

I guess the chance to see Lightroom on Android is much bigger. I have a tablet myself, but I am not using it much and I am not really interested in it. But I see it might appeal to a lot of people.

Report · May 23, 2014

Adobe has actually announced that Lightroom on Android is in development, so I'm looking forward to that and hoping it arrives soon.

As for Lightroom on Linux, I would be willing to pay something like a one-time fee of $50 to add the Linux version to my $10/month CC membership. I've already purchased version 3 and the upgrades to versions 4 and 5. Now, I'm paying monthly, so I wouldn't want to have to buy a full-price license for it, but I'd happily pay up to $50 to be able to run it on Linux as well. Then I could just launch Windows in a VM for the occasional Photoshop task, or convert my Windows8 desktop to Linux and keep Windows running on my laptop. That would make me very happy.

Report · Oct 10, 2014

Until such time as Adobe decides to release a GNU/Linux version of Lightroom, some folks have found ways to make Lightroom work with Wine. Others have it running in a Windows VM under Linux.
I, too, wish they would create a Linux version, even if I had to buy it again, I'd give serious thought to doing so.

Report · Oct 14, 2014

I would be very happy to inform you that 4 years after your initial post, Lightroom 5.2 (32-bit) is now working with Wine 1.7.26 without any major problem and with native like speed.

Unfortunately the 5.6 version of LR (which is the current latest) and any 64-bit version are refusing to install, but it is a known bug or missing feature in Wine and I presume that it will be fixed very soon.

But, all these said, I think you've already switched to Darkroom, which I think is a very very solid and good alternative by the way, I even would have switch to it (from AfterShot Pro) if I was not able to run LR.

Now for all of you guys willing to pay the twice the price of LR to Adobe, pay the regular price and donate the rest to the Wine Project.

Report · Oct 14, 2014

Thank you for letting us know, gulsenyilmaz9!

Report · Oct 25, 2014

Dear Adobe...

It's like a scene from Futurama... SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!.

I had enough of Windows after working with this c*app since 3.1 through all desktop versions and most server versions. I want to use Linux now as i find it more stable and friendly.

So could you finally compile version for Linux please? I don't want to fiddle with wine. Just compile it natively already, please!

Report · Apr 24, 2015

I believe the claim, that Linux is too small a market is outdated. Steam believes otherwise and video games are a market orders of magnitude larger, than Photo editing software. Time to acknowledge that, maybe?

Lightroom is the only thing, that anchors me to Windows.

Report · Apr 24, 2015

There are some decent photo management programs available in Linux. Picasa, digiKam, Shotwell, F-Spot, Darktable, etc.. You can even do tethered shooting with Entangle, which works great and is fast! But, there just isn't anything that does it all in one program as cleanly and efficiently as Lightroom. Darktable is trying, but it just isn't as polished. It's just not the same or as user friendly (if an Adobe product can be called user friendly) as Lightroom. We really just need a Linux version of Lightroom or good support for it in Wine.

Report · Apr 24, 2015

Dan, I think part of that is because gamers have a lot of extra time on their hands. They will take the time to fill out feedback forms and post messages on lists and forums because they want to PLAY THEIR GAMES on Linux! They also don't mind trying stuff and filling out and sending in confusing bug reports to help the development process, etc. You don't typically see business people spending the time doing this because their time is valuable. They just want software that will work and let them get their work done as quickly and efficiently as possible. They also find filling out bug reports horribly confusing, especially when they don't understand all the terminology or even where to begin to describe what they are experiencing. It's another reason why more people aren't switching to Linux in general. It's radically different than Windows and there is a learning curve. Another reason they don't switch to Mac, for that matter (besides Mac being so expensive). I use Linux as my primary operating system. However, I have to keep a Windows 7 virtual machine just to run three programs because they won't run in Linux. iTunes, Corel Graphics Suite, and Lightroom. If it weren't for those I could drop Windows like a bad habit. I most especially want to get Lightroom working in Linux! As it stands now I shoot tethered to my laptop using Entangle and then later transfer the images where I want them saved and load them into Lightroom. I'd rather skip the extra step, though.

Report · Sep 02, 2015

So I can run Linux on my laptop and be done with Windows. Photoshop and Lightroom (and on my desktop, Illustrator) is literally the only software to keep me from switching.

You've already got an OSX version, and since OSX has components ripped from linux, you're probably already halfway. The UI for both programs is completely custom-built, so it's not like you need to rebuild that either. You're basically a recompile away 😉

Report · Sep 02, 2015

Just look at how much demand there is for Linux versions. Why is it still not here? Every new version of anything comes with an oppertunity to build it for Linux as well (natively, not crap solutions like wine), and every time, we are dissappointed.

Why is Adobe so consistently ignoring Linux? Most of the creative suite is already cross-platform between Windows and OSX, and if it's written well (one should hope for such prices) recompiling things to Linux should be dead-simple.

Report · Oct 19, 2015

It has passed quite some time since initial post but I would just like to say that I am too waiting for Lightroom to come to Ubuntu/Linux since having to work with dual boot or virtual machine is just not the same thing.

Report · Oct 19, 2015

This forum is primarily a user-to-user forum in which Adobe product developers rarely participate. I suggest that you add your vote and detailed opinion to this topic in the official Adobe feedback forum: Lightroom: Provide support for Linux. Adobe does read the posts in that forum and occasionally participates.

Report · Oct 20, 2015

I am right now in the 30day the trial of Lightroom, I am going to end up buying it most probably, but not the subscription model, I am going to pay the full price for the standalone version. Right now I will have to use Lightroom inside virtualbox with shared folders between host and client OS but it is a pain to use really and it is not working that good, especially the map module kind of lags.

Just make a Linux version even if at the beginning has limitations like not being able to use GPU power for example since I think that would be a tricky part to implement consistently on Linux. We, the linux users, would still be a lot better served than having to use it inside a virtual machine, using wine, or doing dual-boot.

Report · Oct 21, 2015

GPU acceleration is pretty much the only part that is truly different from either Windows or OSX. Adobe should be able to get pretty far using OpenCL, although Lightroom could function perfectly fine on CPU power only.

The rest of the program should be relatively simple. Adobe is already rolling their own GUI widgets, so the rest can easily be taken from the OSX version, since OSX is internally quite close to Unix, and therefor to Linux. Some other parts can probably be copied from the Windows version, as the graphical stuff in OSX is pretty "unique".

Report · Oct 21, 2015

The APIs on MacOS and Linux are almost completely different. There is very little that could be reused.

Report · Oct 21, 2015

Actually, Lightroom uses platform widgets on Mac and Windows (among other APIs), though some of them are skinned a bit to fit Lightroom's style. They are bound to Lua so code that defines how parts of the interface are assembled is mostly cross platform, but the widgets themselves are platform native.

There's actually already some platform parity issues between the Mac and Windows implementations of this UI subsystem because it was originally built on Mac and Windows was warped to fit that model. I'm not a UI dev and know even less of Linux particulars. If it mapped well onto the existing abstraction, it might not be too bad. If it didn't, it'd be a pretty significant chunk of work to get it to behave (as Windows was, back in the pre-.1.0 beta days when that port was underway).

There are a number of other aspects of Lightroom that bind to platform APIs that would need to be re-written for Linux (some of those could theoretically be switched to use lower level Unix APIs to share code between Mac OS and Linux, but not all), but the UI framework is one of the larger subsystems in terms of OS specific API surface area.

Report · Oct 21, 2015

Also, as Chris notes, many APIs are quite different between MacOS and Linux. The ven diagram of the APIs Lightroom needs and those that are common to Mac OS and Linux due to its shared Unix underpinnings has a relatively small overlap compared to the parts where the APIs are different (sometimes substantially so).

Report · Nov 10, 2015

I would like to vote for a Linux version too. I'm a professional photographer who switched from Windows and Mac to Linux about 8 years ago and don't ever want to go back. I'm using Aftershot Pro at this moment, together with Darktable, but really would like to use Lightroom. Some people say just use Windows for photos and Linux for the rest, but I hate that idea. I'm always getting so annoyed when I'm sitting behind a Windows pc or Mac 😉 and also I'm a webdesigner too, so I need to be able to switch fast and constantly between my website work and photos. If Adobe really likes to have a monopoly on photo editing software, then they should defenitely create Linux ports of Photoshop and Lightroom.

Report · Nov 10, 2015

One doesn't have to hate Windows in order to switch to Linux ;)

Personally I like both. Both have some solid points to go by, but Linux' greatest disadvantage is the lack of popular commercial software like the Adobe programs, as well as a couple of other tools I'm using in my workflow.

Linux on the other hand, is free and comes with a (not really but still)-emulator called Wine, to create lazy developers of Windows/OSX only software. So it's that, or Adobe couldn't give a flying fish about Linux. That would be incredibly stupid, so we'll have to assume Adobe is plotting at least *something*.

We just need to push a little bit.

Report · Nov 10, 2015

It's not Adobe that needs a push, it's Linux users which remain a relatively tiny portion of the marketplace:

http://www.statista.com/statistics/21...

And tablets/phones are on the rise, not Linux, hence LR Mobile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_s...

And I'm sure Adobe has statistics for adobe.com website visits that more accurately reflect interest in their products on each platform.

Report · Nov 11, 2015

1,5% may not seem like much, but Adobe has a HUGE userbase, making those 1,5% count into the tens of thousands in potential. Not right now of course, since Linux is not supported, but if it were, I think it may give Linux (and Adobe) a small boost. For many people, it is the one thing that makes them stuck with Windows, or move over to OSX in an act of desperation.

LR Mobile is a joke, and you (as a "champ") should know it. But seeing how LR is such an incredible CPU and memory hog, it's understandable (for now) that the mobile version is crippled.

Report · Nov 11, 2015

I agree with Martijn. A friend, for example, sees me working on my Linux pc and really would like to switch. The only thing that is keeping him from doing so is the fact that he is so used to using Photoshop and Lightroom and doesn't want to learn working with Gimp or one of the other raw converter. If Adobe would port LR to Linux this would probably mean that all people who are now using Darktable, Lightzone or RawTherapee would buy LR, at least to have it available to them. And a lot of potential Linux users would really switch. They only need to have a push. But, if Adobe has made secret agreements with Windows and Apple or some other software running on these platforms, never to port their software to Linux, than we can wait forever... 😞

Report · Dec 16, 2015

some people were complaining (very noisy) about adobe wasting time on FACE RECOGNITION or the MAP MODULE... because they say it is not used by many.

now some of these people want linux support.. rotfl.
hypocrites....

linux has less than 2% marketshare... and how many linux users are lightroom users?

Report · Dec 16, 2015

You're making a mistake there. The market share may well be so low because Adobe products aren't available in the first place. A big part of the reason I'm on Windows is because of Lightroom and Photoshop.

Adding a feature that noone wants is not the same thing. I would happily do away with face recognition, address lookup and the Mobile Lightroom spam, but they're there for you to use or ignore. A version of Lightroom for Linux users is NOT there for you to use or ignore.

How many linux users are Lightroom users: 0

Those who manage to run it through Wine (which is a disgustingly horrible workaround), will not magically register as linux users, but as Windows users.

Currently it's a classic chicken-and-egg problem, but it can ONLY start with Adobe, not with the userbase.