Developer patches Wine to make Photoshop 2021 & 2025 run on Linux — Adobe Creative Cloud installers finally work thanks to HTML, JavaScript and XML fixes

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Photoshop is not officially supported on Linux and native versions of the app have never been released on the open-source platform. People have managed to get older releases up and running but new editions, those that require Adobe's Creative Cloud, have been locked to macOS or Windows... till now. An ingenious developer has figured out how to make those installers work through a few simple tweaks.

Whenever you try to install Photoshop 2021 or 2025 on Linux, the installer fails because it relies on a lot of Windows dependencies that Wine simply can't emulate. To be clear, Wine is a translation layer, not emulation, so it can't provide everything. This is where developer "PhialsBasement" comes in, who posted their discovery on the r/linux_gaming subreddit.

I Made Adobe CC Installers Work on Linux [PR In Body] from r/linux_gaming

The dev published a set of patches that target deep compatibility issues pertaining to MSHTML and MSXML3: two core Windows subsystems that handle HTML and JavaScript rendering in the installer UI, along with parsing the XML config files. The patch wraps data in CDATA to bypass strict parsing on Linux, and corrects Wine's ID handling so calls reach the OS properly.

The goal is to emulate Internet Explorer-9 style behavior and environment, since that's what Adobe CC-era installers expect. The patch, therefore, also forces Wine to emulate IE9's event handling, so the UI can function as expected. With everything fixed, PhialsBasement shows that Photoshop 2021 installs and "runs butter smooth" — same goes for Photoshop 2025.

These fixes were submitted as a pull request to Valve's Wine repository, as part of Proton, but they were rejected with a push (no pun intended) to submit them to the official WineHQ project first. The developer argued it's slower to get the patch merged upstream and that Valve's fork moves faster, but considering how this isn't gaming-related, it probably would've never gotten approved with Valve.

Anyhow, this marks a major breakthrough toward Adobe CC compatibility on Linux, something that has driven away many professionals from even trying the OS. If PhialsBasement's fixes are implemented platform-wide, it could signal a new era where Photoshop and perhaps even other Adobe CC apps can run natively on Linux.

For now, though, you'd have to manually build a patched version of Wine from the dev's GitHub in order to use the installer on a regular system. If you'd rather not do all that, then Windows apps can still work just fine inside a virtual machine on Linux, if you're really dedicated to that open-source lifestyle.

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Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

18 Comments Comment from the forums

Former_Bubblehead

Things in the Linux world are rapidly approaching the same point OS/2 reached where Windows apps ran without problems and developers all concluded that native app development was no longer needed.
Reply
LordVile

Former_Bubblehead said:
Things in the Linux world are rapidly approaching the same point OS/2 reached where Windows apps ran without problems and developers all concluded that native app development was no longer needed.
Not really, you have to build this yourself, I severely doubt the “butter smooth” claim and one update could brick the whole thing.
Reply
erazog

Former_Bubblehead said:
Things in the Linux world are rapidly approaching the same point OS/2 reached where Windows apps ran without problems and developers all concluded that native app development was no longer needed.
Being able to run desktop Windows software is a huge benefit, the world will never move away from the defacto standard that is Win32 API.

The likes of Adobe will never make a native linux version no matter what and Linux needs professional productivity software to be taken more seriously in the corporate environment.

It doesn't change native linux software development which is own separate modular thing and has no equivalent to Win32.
Reply
timsSOFTWARE

erazog said:
Being able to run desktop Windows software is a huge benefit, the world will never move away from the defacto standard that is Win32 API.

The likes of Adobe will never make a native linux version no matter what and Linux needs professional productivity software to be taken more seriously in the corporate environment.

It doesn't change native linux software development which is own separate modular thing and has no equivalent to Win32.
I wouldn't say "never" - I think currently, most of their addressable market is using Windows or Mac, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to expend the development effort/cost on a Linux version.

But I also think it's been a long time since the future of computing has been in flux as much as it is today. If Linux is a much better platform for AI, and say, integrated Nvidia desktops of the future designed to run local AI-powered applications are a better fit for Linux, then it could start gaining marketshare. Adobe is not going to just let themselves lose a substantial amount of customers to alternative software because they refused to support an operating system that everyone is running.

But, while Linux has made significant improvements on the desktop, the non-commercial nature of it still seems to be holding back the UX. Devs tend to work on things they need - and the devs know how to use the commandline, recompile apps and drivers, etc. So the depth of configuration exposed in the GUI is paper-thin.

A lot of computer users don't want to have to learn how to, say - to use a recent real-world example I encountered - modify code and recompile the input subsystem used by their Linux variant's windowing system, to fix the touchpad scrolling speed being too fast (Ubuntu doesn't offer the option to set scroll speed in the GUI, so that's the only way to fix it).

So I don't know what the answer is there - the big benefit of Linux is that it's open-source and free, but that also means there is no incentive for devs to work on features they're not going to use, test with hardware they don't own, etc.
Reply
ezst036

Creative Cloud?

Doesn't that imply other Adobe software as well, not just Photoshop? What about DreamWeaver? What about Illustrator and InDesign?

How about something perhaps more simple, like Adobe Acrobat?
Reply
mitch074

ezst036 said:
Creative Cloud?

Doesn't that imply other Adobe software as well, not just Photoshop? What about DreamWeaver? What about Illustrator and InDesign?

How about something perhaps more simple, like Adobe Acrobat?
Because Creative Cloud MUST run for other (not cracked) Adobe software to run. Making it run then allows proper compatibility to be explored for the other software.

I would not be surprised if Photoshop worked properly right away then : outside of CPU, RAM and storage, it doesn't ask for much, and considering that it defaults to software rendering, as long as you don't tinker with the settings it should run properly. Premiere is another kettle of fish though, as software rendering for movies is NOT ideal.

Acrobat could be troublesome due to strict font rendering, but AFAIK most were solved years ago. Maybe on some exotic font using hardly used kerning features...

To my knowledge, Wine uses a patched version of Mozilla's Gecko engine to emulate IE's HTML thingie. That's OK for help files, but if Adobe's CC relies on IE9's half-arsed event model to run, chances are it would not work, indeed.
Reply
yearswithgpu

Adobe is evil, there is good reason people switched to DaVinci Resolve/Affinity. 10 process at background just to log in to Cloud software.
Reply
ezst036

mitch074 said:
To my knowledge, Wine uses a patched version of Mozilla's Gecko engine to emulate IE's HTML thingie. That's OK for help files, but if Adobe's CC relies on IE9's half-arsed event model to run, chances are it would not work, indeed.
I did not know IE9 was in Windows 11?

Is the event model still around without the core of IE?
Reply
mitch074

ezst036 said:
I did not know IE9 was in Windows 11?

Is the event model still around without the core of IE?
The interface isn't. However, the mshtml.dll that contains the IE5.5/7/8/9/10/11 HTML engine, and thus the DOM engine and parts of the JS engine is still used by internal MS stuff and, yes, still present.
Reply
Findecanor

But why?

Why not spend your creativity, talent, time and energy on helping to develop an alternative that isn't based on a subscription model?
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