A major barrier for Linux adoption might finally be breaking down because a community developer has successfully patched Wine to run Adobe Creative Cloud installers. This means you can now install specific versions of Adobe Photoshop directly on Linux systems.
The lack of native Adobe Creative Cloud support is a big reason why I’ve seen many amateur and professional artists avoid making the switch to Linux. While open-source tools like GIMP and Krita are powerful, they do not always offer the feature parity or file compatibility that creative studios rely on. Now, a developer known as PhialsBasement claims to have resolved the critical compatibility issues that stopped the Adobe installers from completing the process in Wine.
The fix targets long-standing failures in the Adobe Creative Cloud era installers. These installers rely heavily on specific, older Windows components that Wine has struggled to emulate accurately. Specifically, the patches focus on Wine’s implementations of mshtml and msxml3.
Updates to mshtml include adjustments to COM behavior, DOM event attributes, and how Wine handles JavaScript dispatch. This makes Wine better mimic the older Internet Explorer-style expectations that the installer UI needs to function correctly.
In addition, the patch relaxes the XML parsing behavior in msxml3. Adobe’s installers sometimes use malformed or non-standard XML structures. While Windows tolerates these structures, Wine previously rejected them. This rejection was a known cause of the installer crashing partway through the installation process. The new patch lets Wine tolerate these non-standard XML elements. This basically allows the installation to continue successfully.
The developer posted proof on Reddit showing a successfully finished installation. They confirmed that the fix enables installation of Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025. Once installed, the developer claims that Photoshop 2021 runs “butter smooth.” This is fantastic news for anyone who needs to use Adobe products but prefers the Linux desktop.
I know GIMP is incredibly popular, but in my own experience, it is really difficult to switch to. My degree is in Computer Animation, so I’m not a stranger to Photoshop or GIMP. However, it’s like going from Maya to Blender; the latter is easily better and has more to offer, but the changes and UI differences make it hard to adapt.
Keep in mind that it is purely an experimental, community-driven effort for now. The developer noted some drag-and-drop issues, which they suspect might be related to using the Wayland display server rather than X11. People wanting to try this out immediately will need to either use the developer’s pre-built binaries or learn how to compile the patched Wine from source. That is definitely a bit of an adventure for a newbie Linux user, so I don’t recommend it if you’re not comfortable doing things like this.
The developer initially posted this work as a pull request against Valve’s downstream Wine tree, which is primarily used for the Proton compatibility layer that powers the Steam Deck. However, a Valve maintainer quickly closed the request.
Valve said the patch needs to be evaluated and merged into upstream WineHQ before they would consider backporting it to Proton. This is a standard procedure in open-source development. It seems the comments on the official page back it up. I saw a few of them say it looks good. The next step would be submitting the changes to WineHQ’s GitLab for broader inclusion in the official Wine project.
If these changes are accepted into upstream Wine, this could make using Photoshop on Linux so much easier.
Source: Linuxiac
