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...
Yes, unti i am farmiliar enough with dark table and or RawTherapee i will do the same. When i finaly can get similar results with the other tools, i will cancel my subscription and delete the VM 🙂
And if Adobe should ever realise a Linux Lighroom version, i will change back gladly.
Same here, I really wish they would just make a Linux version. They already have a version for Mac OS, which should be easy enough to port over to Linux, even if it comes with only CPU support for the time being and they add GPU support later.
I've subscribed to this issue for about 8 years. I've bought at least three versions of Adobe Lightroom over the last 10-15 years. Lightroom was one of the main reasons why I still had a dual-boot partition with Windows.
I recently switched from Canon to Fujifilm, only to discover that the latest Lightroom version that's still available with a perpetual license does not support those RAW files, and there's no way to fix that other than subscribing to Adobe CC.
That was a great occasion to finally make the switch to Darktable. I haven't regretted it so far. Darktable is free and open source software. It keeps getting better and better with each release. (Adobe software, in contrast, feels like it's getting worse with each release.)
Yes, switching was quite some work, because I needed to re-learn all those workflows that I've gotten accustomed to over the last 10-15 years. But that's always the case when switching between professional software programs, muscle memory needs to be re-trained.
Forget about Adobe providing support for Linux. They want to lock you into their subscription model. Use this occasion to switch your workflow to Darktable or RawTherapee instead. There are a few good tutorials on YouTube and the user forums are helpful as well.
My thoughts exaclty. I read @dantull's answer. Amongst professionals there is an unwillingnes to use Linux exactly because software like Adobe's is not available for Linux. The OS had matured enought and keeps improving, so if you bring the software, people will have many more reasons to use Linux.
Indeed there are too many distributions and market segmentation, but software can be designed to be distro-independent. A portion of the port seems to be already complete (?)
Adobe apps are available already using WINE. I don’t think the LINUX/Photoshop/Lightroom user base is large enough to support a complete recompile for LINUX.
In an ideal world, with unlimited resources, this would be a good idea. However, Adobe doesn't seem to fix some years-long bugs, and fulfill many useful feature requests.
Resources spent to TEST on Linux would only make this situation worse. There isn't just "Linux." There are multiple popular distros running on Intel and Apple M1 CPUs. Test matrices would balloon.
I would also queston the business rationale for this idea. I suspect that a Linux version would cannibalize the customers for Windows and MacOS, not add additional users.
Just wanted to chime in and upvote this thread. I'm a photographer shooting on Leica SL2-S and would jump to Linux from Windows entirely if Lightroom, Photoshop, or even Camera RAW was available for Linux. As it stands now I can only use Linux for messing around being a nerd and cannot use it for real work.
Rather than spend a ton of money to add Linux support, which would benefit only a small minority of customers I would strongly prefer that Adobe use that money to fix long-standing bugs in Windows/MacOS Lightroom.
Linux is nowadays used in many production environments, especially in video editing and movie production environments. It is also gaining traction in the video gaming environments with projects such as Steam OS.
I think it would be a really smart from Adobe to port its products to Linux. Especially in regard to Lightroom.
This is, I think, one of the things stopping many users from ditching Windows for many professionals.
As a stopgap there are more and more reports of workaround letting Lightroom work on Linux through the use of the wine software, which should allow porting it to Linux with minimal effort, as the thing that is currently stopping users from using it on Linux it's actually the installer being unable to run, while the software apparently works quite well when manually extacted:
Also the problem of having to port for too many different architectures is nowadays completely solved through the use of flatpak that is now supported by most Linux distros even through GUIs.
Linux is nowadays used in many production environments, especially in video editing and movie production environments, such as for compositing software and non-linear montage and color grading. It is also gaining traction in the video gaming environments with projects such as Steam OS.
I think it would be a really smart from Adobe to port its products to Linux.
Nowadays the problem of having to port for too many different distros is completely solved through the use of flatpak that is now supported by most Linux distros even through GUIs.
This is, I think, one of the things stopping many professionals from ditching Windows for many production environments.
I think a stopgap port shouldn't be too complex, there are lots of reports of Adobe software already working quite well through wine (for example https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=39856&iTestingId=113736 ). I think shipping out pre-made flatpak packages with wine support would be pretty user friendly and probably mostly working for
many creative cloud products.
A project such as proton for steamOS but for Adobe software would be totally amazing 🙂
There is a long list of outstanding bugs in the current Lightroom Classic. Recently Adobe has been leveraging AI to improve DEVELOP and this trend needs to continue. Further other parts of Lightroom haven't been enhanced significantly in years, notably the DAM part of LIBRARY. For example, there is no support for subseconds, even though it is part of the EXIF standard. And Adobe really needs to add support for "fuzzy dates" for scanned photos where the exact date is usually not known.
In MAP, the sublocation field really needs improvement. The BOOK module also needs siginficant improvements in options for layouts and formats. I can't speak to the other modules.
Flatpak solves nothing. There is still the HUGE issue of testing, and there a simply too many differnet Linux distros to test, so which ones get supported? And many different versions of each distro.
Linux is pretty much a server system, for which it is very important. Desktop usage is mainly confined to software developers. If Lightoom works under (some versions of ) Linux using Wine, why is that not sufficient? Maybe some enterprising GitHUB contributor can write a native Linux installer for Lightroom.
I'm not opposed to bugs and improvements being done on other platforms, I'm simply proposing them to port it also to Linux.
AFAIK Flatpak was born exactly to overcome all the different libraries problem on every Linux version and should work in a sandbox with all the needed libraries coming with the software. But I admit I don't know much about it apart from the fact it was designed exactly to overcome that problem.
Desktop usage is not limited to software developers, many other fields work on Linux, such as many parts of movies production, just ask compositors on which OS they work; many work on Linux in scientific environments...
also the reason why Linux is still a specialty os is simply because much commercial software is not on it. Things are changing though, if you look around there are many examples of professional softwares being ported to Linux in the last few years.
"Linux is nowadays used in many production environments"
As of right now, it has about 3% market penetration - a complete waste of time as a market, for Adobe. Even Chrome OS is on more desktops.
(As an aside, I laugh at the irony that pretty much every current Linux distro these days is primarily judged on how Windows-like it is. The cognitive dissonance that must involve..!)
Anyway, it's not Adobe's job to facilitate a (relatively tiny) handful of zealots' anti-Windows bias.
It's dead simple:if you want LightRoom, use an OS it runs on. If you want Linux, do without LightRoom.
I know this is asked often, but I'm asking again - can Adobe PLEASE provide support for Lightroom Classic to run on Linux. Whether it's native, flatpaks, snaps, or whatever doesn't matter. It's a good product. I want to give you my money. But I want to run it on Linux to coincide with other things I do.
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