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...
/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-provide-support-for-linux/idc-p/3107951#M21429Jun 06, 2013
Jun 06, 2013
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robin48gx wrote:
tell that to Steam....
Yes, Valve is really interesting, because they are actually supplying something which alot of desktop linux zealots don't seem to pay attention to. Statistics.
According to valve (these data is publicy available from their website), a whooping ~1.38% of steam users are playing on Linux. Oh, and yes, they are helluva segmented. Numbers from valve shows that the most popular one is Ubuntu 12.04 with a, wait for it, whooooping 0.24%
Also, something that you seem to forget is that the current triple A titles simply aren't getting released on Linux. Look at this list
Where's the big games from 2013? Hell, where are the big games from 2012, 2011 etc?
The biggest games being ported all seem to come from Valve. As in, Half Life, Team Fortress and CS. (all games that where released more than a decade ago for Windows).
Somebody where pointing fingers earlier in this thread, claiming that people did not understand how open source works. Well, its quite obvious that this goes both ways. The actual market share that linux have, according to all sources providing this (valve, wikipedia etc) points at less than 2% market share on the desktop. So in reality, for commercial software vendors, renders the penguin fairly irrelevant as a consumer operating system.
Now, add to the mix that these 2% are segmented across literally hundreds of different linux distros, which aren't necessarily compatible with each other, and then your business case went from "irrelevant" to "delusional".
So the million dollar question is, why are Valve supporting/pushing Linux when the numbers are so small? Have they seen the light and want to be part of the great open source nirvana, doing yoga whilst floating around on a fluffy cloud together with the likes of Richard Stallman?
Not likely, in reality, Valve (and its shareholders) are threatened by the fact that Windows 8 is so highly integrated with Xbox Live, since this is a direct attack to their bread and butter business. Hence, they are creating a product, the steam box
to try and move PC gaming into a less Windows dependent environment.
For Valve, this is a good business decision and it makes perfect sense. But in the end of the day, this conversation about steam, which you guys keep wanting to have, because its apparently innate proof that there is a market for Lightroom on Linux is rather contrived.
Just because it makes sense for Valve, doesn't mean it makes sense for Adobe. Adobe just want to push software, and evaluates platforms as “potential profit vs. effort”.
/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-provide-support-for-linux/idc-p/3107952#M21430Jun 06, 2013
Jun 06, 2013
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robin48gx wrote:
I only want to use lightroom, rather than gimp or darktable because other
people at photographic club use it. However why should I have to buy an
inferior OS from apple or microsoft to achieve this....
The answer to that, is actually right there in your question. You say "I only want to use lightroom"
So, its pretty simple really, if you want to use something, made by a provider that doesn't want to support your OS of choice. Then if you want to use it, then you have to use a supported OS. Simple as pie really.
Its their right to choose what to release for, just as its your right to choose what to run.
Just for the record, I completely understand why you don’t like using windows. I don't use windows either(I don’t play games). I use OSX and Linux and it works great for me. For me, its two different OSes, aimed at doing different things.
BTW, what's the source of the AMD statement? That they will now start to provide decent support of their graphics card drivers? As of right now, Catalyst is still removed from my distribution of choices because of their poor linux support.
/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-provide-support-for-linux/idc-p/3107956#M21434Jun 06, 2013
Jun 06, 2013
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Cheers for the link, thats v11.3 though. Im already on catalyst 11.3 which still havent added support for the "new" xorg.
Also, that driver delivery service is a good example of why linux is a royal PITA for software vendors, if I used this on my linux box i'd be in trouble. Since my distribution of choice is a rolling distribution, that will push kernel updates as and when they are ready. The catalyst DKMS driver would need to explicitly be reinstalled. So unless I do this manually, or unless I use the hooks made specifically for my distro, I would get into trouble after system updates. Same would be true for Gentoo users would have similar problems, and any other distro which updates kernels between releases.
Segmentation IS a problem on linux. But, at the same time, its also what makes linux great.
I am a computer administrator and work at a company with over 120 employees. We have converted almost all of the computers at company X to Linux based distributions. Employees have asked for me to, and I have converted several of their home computers to Linux. (Most are Debian Based (Ubuntu / Mint) and a few CentOS). I even do some moonlighting with professional photographers setting up FreeNAS file servers. They are eager to move to Linux for the speed and cost and some are trying to use OSALTs like digiKam.
Steam has woken up and now Microsoft even offers a Linux based Office Suite. If Adobe doesn't cater to a wider customer base, then someone else will. Adobe doesn't necessarily need to make a full blown Linux version, but perhaps a more WINE friendly one.
A WINE friendly version?
I would never go for that. A fully supported version for Linux. As long as that is not available, it will be a dual boot or an extra computer specially Lightroom e.a.
A sub-optimal, inefficient and costly solution. Maye virtualization will bring a workable solution in the future...
With the cloud and new way to deal with customers (I know Lr is still available without the cloud, but for how much longer?) trying to lock them in a pay-per-month-or-you-loose-your-work model better moving away from Adobe product anyway at this stage.
I've been one of many people asking for a Lr on GNU/Linux (even ready to pay twice the price if necessary) but now even if Lr for GNU/Linux sees light I'm not even sure to buy it for the above reasons. I'm a quite happy user of darktable which impress me every day (and yes I'm an quite experimented user of Lr).
This is available now! 2-3 years ago i've transferred my windows from dual bot to virtual machine using VirtualBox on top of my ubuntu machine with i7 and 16G ram. I run lightroom on it without any problems with quite good performance.
But of course, I would love to see native linux version
I have very very poor performance on a VM with VirtualBox. The local editing is so slow that it is unusable (I have a D800 so the RAW is large). Also printing is impossible, my 3880 prints 2 lines every 20 seconds or so.
+1 for a wine friendly version. Even Civ 5 is made wine friendly.
Using any VM for LR is a bad idea. Any type of graphics emulation means colour compression. If you want consistent color you need a native app or one running in wine.
Pascal,
I work with smaller RAW's from C5Dm2, but performance is very similar to this from bare machine. I work with files that are stored on my linux machine and are connected to VM as network drives. Make sure you leave at least 6G for VM, and you have more than 1 virtual cpu in VM settings (i've enabled 8, so my VM can use all hardware threads). Check in BIOS if virtualization for your CPU is enabled (also, your CPU must support this feature, what is very important) and then check 'Enable VT-x/AMD-V' checkbox on Acceleration tab of VM settings. I think that 3D and 2D acceleration from Display tab, may be important.
From my benchmarks, on my i7 @3,6GHz there is no more that 5-10% decrease in performance in cpu processing time.
open source alternatives are getting better and better. LR as it is today (no cloud version, with a lifetime license) is way better - you get consistent colours for example and a large database of lens and camera color profiles - you don't get that in OSS alternatives.
I would loose interest in LR if it would be licensed "per-month" thou...
OSS alternatives are getting better and better at lens correction and denoise based on sensors profiles. In dt I get excellent results in darktable. And the momentum is very good...
There are many reason not to use WINE, (don't even get me started), however there is always reputation and the bottom dollar to consider. Here is my logic:
1) A native version would be awesome, but when porting to different operating systems and deadlines to meet / revenues to generate, a very broken version that deters customers has often surfaced.
2) Small modification of the program by their creators is much easier especially since the WINE DDLs are open sourced.
3) The WINE community code could benefit for Adobe's input.
4) A true percentage of the Linux community customer base would be established by LR phoning home with the true OS the user is running. This could provide a stepping stone for a native version.
5) I am a Linux believer but from a programmers aspect, writing graphically intensive native code for all of the major Linux distributions can be a headache. It's a good idea to offload as much processing to the GPUs as possible, but NVIDIA, INTEL, AMD, binary and open source drivers make this difficult. There are allot of variables to consider. On another note, Darktable does to many of the things LR does (even GPU accelerated), just not as many community created filters which turns off many photographers.
For those customers that insist on running LR on a Linux Distro, I do create a Windows XP / (7) VM (VirtualBox), and create an icon that open in seamless mode with no Windows taskbar. This gives the illusion of running the program in a native environment (yes the customers actually know what is going on) and is "good enough" for them. The tweaks I do are exactly as mentioned by "Piotr Jaczewski ", however on RAM limited environments, I will allow host caching for the virtual HDD if the user needs other major programs running. (Prevents alot of HDD thrashing when Windows goes to use the pagefile).
The largest single performance boost I can recommend for anyone is "get yourself a solid state drive".
Whew... In closing, I wonder if anyone has tried Codeweaver's support for LR.
P.S. Make sure that you install the VirtualBox Extension Pack else you will only have USB 1.1 support and printing will be very very slow (12 Mb /s / 1.5 MB /s). USB 2.0 is 480 Mb /s / 60 MB /s) without overhead.
I think I will attempt LR on WINE with hand picked Windows DLLs. I really haven't given this any serious effort, only looked for others' solutions. I'll let you know what I come up with over the weekend. If I get it to work I will post my results on this forum with which DLLs to replace. I will start with LR 4 and Windows XP seeing as I don't have any other version of LR available to me now. After XP I will skip VISTA and go straight to 7. The down side is if I get this to work, it will only be available to legitimate Windows users (shouldn't be too bad said Windows XP computers are about as common as flies in a dumpster in back of a fish market).
Also, as I release my findings, hopefully the rest of the forum users here could help me with alpha testing.
Wish me luck!
FWIW I tried to run LR4 with Crossover from 11.3 up. This doesn't work in Linux Mint 13 (32 bit). I don't know enough about LR to offer any explanation, but would be happy to take part in any further experiments.
Personnally I have abandonned Lightroom. I now use digikam? If one day there is a lightroom for linux I will consider it, but for now it's bye bye adobe.
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