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...
Hello!
It's a question that has been asked many times in other venues about Photoshop, and the message I always heard is that the market research hinted that there might not be enough Linux users that would want to pay for the software. Not enough versus the cost of porting, and maintaining a Linux version (Quality Assurance, for instance), and also that the linux market is too fragmented, and that the necessary groundwork might not be there. (color management, etc.)
I work on the LR team and actually tinkered a bit (back in the 1.4 - 2.0 timeframe) with making some tweaks to LR and Wine to make it run that way, but never had enough (personal) time to throw at the job.
Lightroom probably has a lower porting effort than (say) Photoshop since it is smaller in general and many of the pieces are very portable (the Lua interpreter, SQLite, and much of the app is already in platform agnostic Lua scripting code), but it's still a pretty big undertaking.
My home laptop is dual booted with Windows 7 now for Lightroom and Netflix watch instantly...
P.S. I'd encourage your friends to cast their votes as well. If there's any way to ensure it doesn't happen it'd be for this post to have only a couple of votes!
it has my vote. I have been an adobe customer for a very long time and am very disappointed that none of my apps run properly under Linux. I am 100% Linux now on all my machines at home and work, and miss the features of Lightroom and Elements for Photo editing. I hate to think of looking at other products, but Adobe doesn't work well in wine.
Count me in as disapointed. I'm a Lighrroom customer since version 2.0 and keep a Windows partition just for handling my pictures. This is just bad as it break my workflow, each time I want to handle my pictures I need to reboot!!!! I've been asking about a GNU/Linux Lighroom version, always the same answer not enough potential client... I just bet this is wrong and reading post from different forums it seems that the port should not be that hard and that many people are asking for it.
So yes count me in! I've even said that I'm ready to pay twice the price for Lightroom on GNU/Linux, I'm not joking, I'd pay that and right away!
Right, I do think many people are ready to pay... Not sure Adobe seems to be interested though 😞 I've never read a NO or YES from Adobe, seems like they are just ignoring this from years now!
Exactly, there is many people on my photo club ready to buy a GNU/Linux license. Of course GNU/Linux is a smaller (far smaller) market now, but well why should I be forced to use Windows!
If you know folks that would be interested in a Linux version, I'd really encourage you to have them jump on this thread and at least add a vote for it. I subscribe to all replies on this thread and read all of them. See my post above, I'm a developer, LR team member, and home Linux user myself.
I can't speak for how many votes it'd take to inspire action for a full native port (that decision is not mine to make), but if I saw the vote count on this thread start climbing enough (lets say 50+, enough to get it in the top 5 most popular Lightroom requests), I might be inspired to resurrect my personal side project of getting LR to work respectably under Wine as a starting point. Since I have access to the code, I may even be able to make tweaks that make the app more portable if time permits, especially if it turns out the misbehavior under Wine turns out to be an Lightroom side bug that Windows just handles more gracefully.
The testing and development cost of a full port would be high enough that it'd be hard to make a business case for it. However, if getting it operational under Wine could build some momentum and demonstrate a paying customer base, it might give me more to work with to make the case.
Just my 2 cents.
DT
P.S. I've also purchased all the Humble Bundles as my own personal way of supporting developers that support desktop Linux, too. Well, that and there have been some really nice indie games that have participated that I was thinking of picking up anyway.
Voted, thanks to Pascal !
I've been a linux advocator long enough to be interested and willing to purchase a linux license if available, even though I now own a Mac license. I like the idea to be able to have a free (like in freedom) OS to fallback to just in case OS-X goes worse in the future.
I'm using GNU/Linux (and only that) since more 10 years. So, I can't use LightRoom for my Photo processing. And I dont want to buy a Windows license for only that.
I vote for a GNU/Linux version of LightRoom.
I just notice that BibbleLabs (a little bit smaller than Adobe) edits a GNU/linux version of Bibble. Why Adobe can't do that ?
I think the reason we won't get many comments here is because the majority of linux users has already lost hope. Adobe never gives a direct answer just a lot of hot air.
I feel the same but I don't want to believe that 😞 I hope Adobe will at some point give us GNU/Linux users the opportunity to avoid messing with dual-boots!
I just want to weigh in here, I've been following this thread for some time now but never wrote. Now I finally decided to write here, just so I won't angry with myself, when I read again that there aren't enough people who can even be bothered to write here.
I'm a linux user for several years now, I got really in to photography this year and I would be willing to buy Adobe Lightroom in the blink of an eye if there was a linux version. I was tempted to buy a windows version but decided against, it simply because I don't want to support Adobes negligence of the linux community (e.g. not even bother to optimize lightroom to run in wine or creating a native linux version). And for the moment i can make due with the alternatives. I do realise however, that there are many people who would like to use linux but don't have this choice, since they earn their living as photographers.
But I am also quite sure, that there are a lot of linux users like me who would be willing to pay, but who don't need lightroom urgently enough to get the windows version. Let's face it linux users tend to be a bit geeky or just plain nerds. And those two share at least one characteristic; they are passionate about there hobbies. Therefore I assume quite a lot of them would be willing to spend the money on Lightroom, since it really isn't that expensive compared to other photo gear.
I hope I can encourage others to join in and help Adobe convince there is a market for their products in the linux community. We are willing to pay!
I'll admit that I'm one of those who have searched and found "many" posts of Lr users wanting/wishing for a Linux version. I fully understand the difficulties in porting and more importantly supporting the application to a potentially large number of Linux distros. Nevertheless, I still hold out hope that I will one day be able to get rid of my Windows VMWare install when I can pay for a Lr linux version.
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