adobe's a for-profit corporation. if you have a proposal that shows their cost of porting to linux would be offset by the many linux users known to purchase software, make your pitch to adobe.
Going by numbers alone, Creative Cloud is a niche in the computing world, and Photoshop is a smaller niche within that.
The total number of people on the Internet is said to be somewhere around 5 and half billion users. Yes, that includes desktop and mobile since a large percentage of those are smartphones only, but it’s valid because Adobe sells subscriptions worldwide across desktop and mobile.
30 million Creative Cloud users across a total addressible market of 5.5 billion users is 0.5%, half a percent. That’s definitely a niche number, with Photoshop an even smaller fraction of that.
Within the creative community, yes, the 30 million Creative Cloud and Photoshop subscribers are dominant and not a niche.
Before it comes up, fragmentation in the Linux community is not an issue. Pick a popular version, say, Ubuntu, and stick with it. The Adobe community who wants off Windows and OSX will migrate to it. By @roc97007
It’s hard to really know for sure, but it is interesting to see that Linus Torvalds himself claims that fragmentation is an issue:
For Photoshop specifically, though, you may be right…if Photoshop was released on only one Linux distribution, it does seem likely that a lot of people would just use that one.
Not going to get into semantics @Conrad C - my point was not comparing CC/Photoshop vs every person on the planet. Adobe is the largest software developer in terms of adoption and usage for design/photography/video editing. Show me another Imaging/Video/Content creation software with a higher user base and I'll concede. Whats niche is the industry itself but that is also the customer base for the company.
Back to the original discussion - if someone can prove to Adobe that there is a market with profits to be had/ROI on developing for Linux you'd think they would have done more in 13 years since this thread started.
According to what Chris Cox (former Photoshop engineer) once said, Linux has no proper color management support. That may have changed for all I know - but if that's still the case, the whole thing is a non-starter anyway. Photoshop's whole architecture revolves around functional color management.
There is also the issue of architectural support. Intel? Qualcomm ARM? Apple? What about video cards? Just nVidia?
Finally, you have the zealots who would scream endlessly about Photoshop and all of its associated add-ons being closed-source and demanding absolute control over what runs and how.
I love Linux, but it's just a non-starter, as has been pointed out many, many times. It makes no business sense to invest all the money, time, and effort to support such a tiny, yet disparate community. I hate MicroSoft and Apple. I've used both Macs (at work) and PCs (home and work) running Adobe programs since 1997. I've been building computers since 1994, and running Linux since 1998.
My coworker's 2017 27" iMac crashes several times a day and hasn't been able to be updated successfully since 2019. (I'm fairly sure this could be fixed by contacting Apple, but I guess we don't want to pay to do it...) The 2020 iMac never has problems, and the four Windows work systems I've built spanning 2013 to 2019 and the two home ones I currently have have never, ever crashed, so OS stability comparisons are moot. (Windows 10 still sucks. 11 sucks harder.)
Anyway, if someone can create an emulator for Linux that will support Photoshop, not the other way around, they'll just get sued into oblivion, so there is ultimately no real chance of ever - EVER - getting Linux support.
I look forward to checking in on this thread in another decade...
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