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...
"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.
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.
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.)
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,
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.
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.
Lightroom is now the only application I use for which I need Windows. I'm thinking ot trying Bibble, since I'll soon have to replace the old XP system that I use to run Lightroom, and I'd rather spend the money on something besides a new version of Windows.
So with the number of votes in this thread can we hope for a port to GNU/Linux? Any news from Adobe? Or was it a joke when you said that with enough vote you'll consider a port? If it was, I can tell you that's not fun at all 😞
I want to make sure what I said was clear. I didn't say that getting enough votes would make Adobe consider a port, only that having almost no votes would do the opposite (reaffirm the choice not to have one).
I did say if I saw enough interest I'd think harder about taking another run at getting Lightroom to work in Wine. I did actually try to install Lightroom via Wine a few weeks ago having seen the continued growth of votes on this topic, though it did remind me how much work it'd be to even get good Wine portability, so I do take that pledge seriously (even if I have doubts on my ability to pull it off).
So, not a joke, but not a promise, either. I do still want a version of Lightroom (or a lighter app with some of the core functionality and catalog compatibility) on Linux, but it isn't going to happen overnight...
As your comment may imply you are aware, Edge and Lightroom do share a very small piece of the same software DNA. Unfortunately not enough to amount to much in the way of shared porting costs, though.
I am not a professional photographer so perhaps my vote - and the fact that I was prepared to pay for Bibble 5 Pro, and an upgrade to the new Corel Aftershot Pro - does not count.
On the other hand, I did earn my living for 40 years by being able to reason in a logical fashion. How can Adobe prove, sorry: demonstrate, whether there is or is not a market for this software on Linux, other than by dipping its toe in the water?
Well, as regards surveying Linux users, I can understand that this activity is one of the raisons d'etre of this thread. I would, on the other hand, say that it was quite hard to find. In fact, by the time Google pointed it out to me, I had already paid for a competitor product.
What I can't really connect to is the interest in companies that use Linux. In how many companies (whatever their standard Desktop platform), would LR and PS be part of the standard software loadset? That wouldn't have been the case in either of the major accounting and consulting firms in which I used to work.
Well, the consulting firms had an incredible menagerie of software, since they had to be able to provide services in their clients' toolsets. Which suggests that their clients didn't use LR or PS in the mainstream, either.
The question I was really asking the employees in this thread was: what percentage of the sales for LR and PS were known to have gone to corporates, since Chris Cox says that Adobe are canvassing companies as well as induhviduals.
You probably won't get an answer to that. Accounting/consulting are unlikely to be representative of Adobe's market though - unlike publishing and the various "creative" industries.
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