Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Ronny Nilsen on January 27, 2006, 01:43:51 am
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Is there a possibility that Adobe will port PS and Lightroom to the Linux platform?
Linux is gaining marketshare on the desktop and I would love to have the Adobe products on my computers. My current tools is Bibble and gimp for image prosessing, but I would love to have PS and Lightroom. PS is one of the few applications I miss after tossing out windows a few years back from an old PC that was running windows.
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No, as of now it doesnt seem that adobe will port much to linux...
you could anways use wine/crossover-Office and try to install it... there will probably be some articles/guides floating about it over the internet soon enough....
or use vmware/qemu (virtual machines) and install windows (and then photoshop/lightroom) on them, then run them under (more or less) linux.
or keep using gimp (worst alternative im my opinion)
LT
Is there a possibility that Adobe will port PS and Lightroom to the Linux platform?
Linux is gaining marketshare on the desktop and I would love to have the Adobe products on my computers. My current tools is Bibble and gimp for image prosessing, but I would love to have PS and Lightroom. PS is one of the few applications I miss after tossing out windows a few years back from an old PC that was running windows.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=56874\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
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I have tried vmware and other solutions, but it's often a pain to keep things working.
Orderd a new computer today to use for this, an AMD 64 with dual core and a dual head graphics card.
So Adobe had better come out with the windows version of ligthroom fast so I have somthing to use on the machine.
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Is there a possibility that Adobe will port PS and Lightroom to the Linux platform?
Linux is gaining marketshare on the desktop and I would love to have the Adobe products on my computers. My current tools is Bibble and gimp for image prosessing, but I would love to have PS and Lightroom. PS is one of the few applications I miss after tossing out windows a few years back from an old PC that was running windows.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=56874\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Bibblegimp shrimp co... er... I mean Bibble + Gimp is the only real solution at the moment and I have serious doubts that Adobe even knows what Linux is. Maybe after Google releases Goobuntu then software companies will wake up and see that many people desire to not be locked into the Windows collective.
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Is there a possibility that Adobe will port PS and Lightroom to the Linux platform?
I wouldn't hold my breath. I was beta testing adobe's port of FrameMaker to Linux. They had it completely working, and then decided not to market it! Very frustrating. I had boycotted adobe for many years after that, but now I run PSE3. I find vmware a pretty good solution to working a mixed windows/linux environment. I ran linux for 5 years, and developed software on that platform, but I have given up on it due to the lack of applications. It's a great way to go if you do your own development. I can't live without Qimage, and linux will never have it. Things are just too easy in XP Pro. Load CD, install, and cruise. Linux is getting more like that, but there still aren't the apps. I'd happily pay for them, but most linux users don't want to pay anything for software. So I now live in the rotten world between the 2 OSes. That means twice the frustration and twice the learning curve. It sure would have been nice if Gates put XP on top of Intel Linux. I'm just not an apple user either. They put their windows on top of BSD UNIX, and still no Qimage, doesn't run the optical design program I use nor the CAD program we use... Did I mention that I hate wine--I'd rather just run directly on XP.
JMHO
Steve W
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I guess I moostly agree woth you Steve. I'm a sw deveoper and sw-architect and does almost all my work on Linux, and while tings on linux is mostly free, I miss some application, such as PS, and I would be happy to pay for it.
I'm simply bying another computer to run win XP on to get the applicatyions.
To bad Adobe won't support linux, it's not that hard to do if you choose the rigth architecture, but I guess Adobe have made som implementatiuons choises that can make it somewhat expensive to support. I would guess that PS and Lightroom is written in C++? If they had used Java, Ligthroom would probably have been available on win already, and for using legacy code from PS etc. they could have used JNI to save development time.
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Looks like I'm not the only one missing PhotoShop etc. on Linux:
Why Photoshop tops most-wanted Linux app list (http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT6362808891.html)
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To bad Adobe won't support linux, it's not that hard to do if you choose the rigth architecture, but I guess Adobe have made som implementatiuons choises that can make it somewhat expensive to support.
From what I gather, PS contains heaps of ancient code from at least version 5, possibly 4.
This is one of the reasons why 16 bpc support was only partially available for what, five years, before CS2 finally clinched it.
And still Adobe seems to be struggling to allow Photoshop to utilize large amounts memory efficiently.
So "ancient codebase" seems to be the better explanation.
I would guess that PS and Lightroom is written in C++?
Or maybe just plain C.
If they had used Java, Ligthroom would probably have been available on win already, and for using legacy code from PS etc. they could have used JNI to save development time.
Yes, but PS would also probably have been lots slower, and we'd have learned to use Java debuggers to reverse-engineer the code and create third-party patches.
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From what I gather, PS contains heaps of ancient code from at least version 5, possibly 4.
This is one of the reasons why 16 bpc support was only partially available for what, five years, before CS2 finally clinched it.
And still Adobe seems to be struggling to allow Photoshop to utilize large amounts memory efficiently.
So "ancient codebase" seems to be the better explanation.
Or maybe just plain C.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=57541\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Thats what i politly was hinting at with "implementations choises that can make it somewhat expensive to support."
But Java would make it possible to use this "ancient codebase". And at the same time making support of many and new platforms easier.
Yes, but PS would also probably have been lots slower, and we'd have learned to use Java debuggers to reverse-engineer the code and create third-party patches.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=57541\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
That Java is slower than native code is old myths. The overhead theese days is minimal and the speed of your disk will probably impact the speed of PS and Ligthroom an order of magnitude more.
But as you say, Adobe is probably implementinmg this the expensive way.
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But Java would make it possible to use this "ancient codebase". And at the same time making support of many and new platforms easier.
Uh, how exactly would they go about doing that?
Java doesn't solve the problem of interoperability. It's not a magic bullet.
That Java is slower than native code is old myths. The overhead theese days is minimal and the speed of your disk will probably impact the speed of PS and Ligthroom an order of magnitude more.
Java proponents have been saying this for seven or eight years. It wasn't true that it was old myths then, it wasn't true two or three years ago, and I have sincere doubts as to it being a myth now.
Java proponents usually use examples of complex, well-written code being faster than complex, bad-written "native" code, just as the C or C++ proponents would use compact and elegant code compared to Java exception hell.
The overhead is there yet, even though it's "minimal" and the speed of the disk always impacts the speed more. How much this impacts performance depends on your code, what your code does, etc. But do you see lots of technical computing applications being written in Java, or are the faster mathematical manipulations still done in C or FORTRAN?
But that's a sidetrack from the point I was making, which is that PS would have been slower, if it had been implemented in Java already.
The reason for that is that if it had been implemented in Java already, it would most likely be using old libraries and interfaces for graphics handling anyway.
(Of course, you have to know that graphics handling in Java has improved a lot over the years in order to get that particular point, but still ...)
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Is there a possibility that Adobe will port PS and Lightroom to the Linux platform?
Linux is gaining marketshare on the desktop and I would love to have the Adobe products on my computers. My current tools is Bibble and gimp for image prosessing, but I would love to have PS and Lightroom. PS is one of the few applications I miss after tossing out windows a few years back from an old PC that was running windows.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=56874\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
This is highly unlikely to happen.
The demand for Photoshop on Linux is driven more by Geeks who have purchased low end DSLRs and realised that Gimp is not the Photoshop slayer that it was once hyped up to be. From the other perspective someone whose primary business is photography or creative arts is very unlikely to touch Linux with a barge pole. So, from a commercial perspective - Linux is pretty much non existent within the professional imaging market and, therefore, not a likely platform on which Adobe will deliver photographic products.
As to writing Photoshop or Lightroom in Java would be so that I could run it on my mobile phone
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Uh, how exactly would they go about doing that?
Java doesn't solve the problem of interoperability. It's not a magic bullet.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=57688\")
[a href=\"http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/jni/spec/jniTOC.html]JNI[/url]
It's not perfect, but solves most of the problems of being abel to use an old codebase without having to rewrite it all in Java. Java is probably one of the easiest languages to interface to ancien code.
The overhead is there yet, even though it's "minimal" and the speed of the disk always impacts the speed more. How much this impacts performance depends on your code, what your code does, etc. But do you see lots of technical computing applications being written in Java, or are the faster mathematical manipulations still done in C or FORTRAN?
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=57688\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
But that's ofen done in C or FORTRAN becuse that is the language that is used and published in papers, not always because of the need for the speed difference. Many proffesional will learn one language and anything new is scary. Just as many photographers will use one brand of camera and be insulted if someone suggest that another brand also makes good cameras.
But I guess we are far off topic now so I'll stop with this.
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This is highly unlikely to happen.
The demand for Photoshop on Linux is driven more by Geeks who have purchased low end DSLRs and realised that Gimp is not the Photoshop slayer that it was once hyped up to be. From the other perspective someone whose primary business is photography or creative arts is very unlikely to touch Linux with a barge pole. So, from a commercial perspective - Linux is pretty much non existent within the professional imaging market and, therefore, not a likely platform on which Adobe will deliver photographic products.
That is a circular argument, Descartes would be proud of you; Linux is a non-entity within the professional imaging market because it's a non-entity within the professional imaging market.
Windows was in a similar position not too long ago, yet Adobe clearly wants to put their money into developing for the various Windows platforms.
It's just a SMOP.
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You could try 'LightZone ' for Linux, available at - http://sonic.net/~rat/lightcrafts/ (http://sonic.net/~rat/lightcrafts/)
It's free and a labour of love, maintained by Anton Kast, one of the 'LightZone' developers.
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A new killer app is emerging rapidly out of the dark:
Krita (http://www.koffice.org/krita/)
If its development will continue with the same speed as it showed recently, there won't be a need for Photoshop on Linux anymore.
There is full 16-bit support as well as the possibility to use pressure-sensitive tablets. It even offers color management.
And furthermore, there is digiKam (http://www.digikam.org/), a photo management application for the KDE Desktop. It has 16-bit support too. Its first official release (still under its way) will incorporate a raw converter, based upon dcraw, as well.
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A new killer app is emerging rapidly out of the dark:
Krita (http://www.koffice.org/krita/)
If its development will continue with the same speed as it showed recently, there won't be a need for Photoshop on Linux anymore.
There is full 16-bit support as well as the possibility to use pressure-sensitive tablets. It even offers color management.
I've missed the last few minor releases of krita, but the last time i tried it, I found it was quite good for images up to 640x480. Any complex operation was based on CImg/greycstoration, and CImg/greycstoration performance is (was?) a joke. Has this changed in any meaningful way? (i.e. can you work on an 8MP image without an enterprise-grade 16-ways/16GB machine?)
Piero
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Hi,
I would like to run Lightroom on Linux buy I think there is a major issue, namely that you need monitor calibration. AFAK there is only one hardware calibrator for Linux (from Kodak) and I assume that it is far to expensive for common users. I wouldn't consider using Lightroom on uncalibrated hardware.
Other than that I have been an enthusastic Linux user, that is until Lightroom arrived, but now I have succumbed to "The Evil Empire". Although I still love Linux!
Erik
Is there a possibility that Adobe will port PS and Lightroom to the Linux platform?
Linux is gaining marketshare on the desktop and I would love to have the Adobe products on my computers. My current tools is Bibble and gimp for image prosessing, but I would love to have PS and Lightroom. PS is one of the few applications I miss after tossing out windows a few years back from an old PC that was running windows.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=56874\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
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Is there a possibility that Adobe will port PS and Lightroom to the Linux platform?
Linux is gaining marketshare on the desktop and I would love to have the Adobe products on my computers. My current tools is Bibble and gimp for image prosessing, but I would love to have PS and Lightroom. PS is one of the few applications I miss after tossing out windows a few years back from an old PC that was running windows.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=56874\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
It is a great pity that Adobe cannot be persuaded to offer a Linux-build. For those that don't know, Linux is in many ways superior to Windows. Fewer know that Linux has offered a fully functional 64-bit operating system for a couple of years now. In my opinion, 64-bit address space is a necessity for working with the large images produced by today's digital cameras. I am very tired of waiting for PS to page. Perhaps I am wrong, but I do not see any suggestion that Vista supports 64-bit computing.
64-bit Linux is so good as a personal computing platform that the only things that keep me with Windows are the lack of color-management and a good PS-like application. Of course I would pay for that. Perhaps the general public will not embrace Linux, but this would be a no-brainer for photographers.
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It is a great pity that Adobe cannot be persuaded to offer a Linux-build. For those that don't know, Linux is in many ways superior to Windows. Fewer know that Linux has offered a fully functional 64-bit operating system for a couple of years now. In my opinion, 64-bit address space is a necessity for working with the large images produced by today's digital cameras. I am very tired of waiting for PS to page. Perhaps I am wrong, but I do not see any suggestion that Vista supports 64-bit computing.
64-bit Linux is so good as a personal computing platform that the only things that keep me with Windows are the lack of color-management and a good PS-like application. Of course I would pay for that. Perhaps the general public will not embrace Linux, but this would be a no-brainer for photographers.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=88026\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
This my view as well, I use windows because i need monitor calibration, but since my main RAW-sw is Bibble I can do much on Linux and only have to resort to windows when correcting colors and contrast etc. Cropping, sorting and generating jpgs can be done on Linux as all my machines use the same netwoked filesystem, and I can use bibble from any os to fix the images.
But having color management and the adobe sw (LR and CS2) on linux would be far better for my use.
With any luck a 16-bit color version of gimp will be available, and hopefully Linux will get colormanagement some day.
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With any luck a 16-bit color version of gimp will be available, and hopefully Linux will get colormanagement some day.
http://www.cinepaint.org/ (http://www.cinepaint.org/)
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To bad Adobe won't support linux, it's not that hard to do if you choose the rigth architecture, but I guess Adobe have made som implementatiuons choises that can make it somewhat expensive to support. I would guess that PS and Lightroom is written in C++? If they had used Java, Ligthroom would probably have been available on win already, and for using legacy code from PS etc. they could have used JNI to save development time.
My two cents... So Lightroom is implemented in Objective-C interlaced with Lua. There are C++ addition as well. Adobe is trying to push this to another product and try to unify it. So I don't think that porting to linux is somehow hard. Adobe has some nice platform indepedent libs (some of them opensourced), so it is only marketing which is putting obstacles to porting.
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There are many advantages of Linux, I agree. But what % of photo enthusiasts and photo professionals use Linux? Does anyone know? My guess is that it's a tiny market compared to Windows and Mac OS X. If it's as small as I think it is, then it doesn't make much economic sense for Adobe to go through the effort of supporting it.
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Perhaps I am wrong, but I do not see any suggestion that Vista supports 64-bit computing.[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] (http://index.php?act=findpost&pid=88026\")
There is a 64 bit version of Vista, but applications that support 64 bit operation are few and far between. Indeed, there was (eventually) a 64 bit version of Windows XP, but it was a white elephant because of lack of drivers.
Driver support is still an issue for 64 bit Vista. 32 bit applications will run on 64 bit Vista, but you must have 64 bit drivers for your hardware, and 64 bit versions of some programs that interact with the OS at a low level, such as antivirus software (the situation is not as bad here as it once was; I use Kaspersky AntiVirus for Windows Workstations, which now has 64 bit support), backup software and defragmentation software.
Things are slowly getting better in 64 bit Windows land - for example, Wacom tablets now have 64 bit drivers, and a lot of modern mid to high end hardware also has support. If you're buying a new machine and want 64 bit Vista support, it's best to buy the machine with 64 bit Vista installed - that way, all components have to be 64 bit compatible.
Many of us will lose at least some existing hardware switching to a 64 bit OS. The real nasty with 64 bit Vista, as I understand is, is that it's not just a case of the hardware companies producing Vista drivers - you can only install them in 64 bit Vista if they are correctly digitally signed unless you're prepared to press F8 at every boot and choose an option to load unsigned drivers.
I'm pretty fortunate in that all three of my printers have Vista 64 bit support (HP Photosmart Pro B9180, HP Color LaserJet 3800dtn, Canon i865 - not that that gets much use now).
My USB bits and pieces are a much more mixed bag. Most seem to have drivers for Vista 64 bit - my Wacom Intuos 3 tablet certainly does, as does my Dymo label printer. Card readers and USB hard disks don't need drivers - they use Windows' own HID driver. My keyboard and mouse (if I moved them to a future Vista box anyway) are Microsoft products, so no problems there. My APC SmartUPS should be OK; the hardware driver on Windows XP is a Microsoft one anyway and I suspect this is also the case on Vista, whilst the higher level software is now available in a Vista compatible version.
At this point I begin to hit problems. My HP ScanJet 7450C scanner only has a very limited WIA driver for Vista anyway - be it 32 bit or 64 bit - I'm a bit ticked off at HP for dropping support for what was an expensive scanner so quickly. My Monaco OPTIX XR Pro monitor calibrator may work - there is a Vista driver for the hardware (for both 32 and 64 bit), but I'm not sure how well the software works under Vista. My Philips webcam is ancient and there's no Vista drivers at all, though that's not a great loss as webcams are cheap. My Bluetooth dongle may work with Vista's own Bluetooth stack - if not, that would also need replacing, though I am thinking of tossing it in favour of a Bluetooth 2.0 one anyway.
In fact, I seem to be in the same position with my peripheral hardware whether I wanted to use it with a new Vista 32 bit machine or a new Vista 64 bit machine (I'm not intending to upgrade any of my current computers to Vista - if I do go to Vista, it will be on new hardware). I'm not sure many will be so fortunate.
However, the big question is whether it's worth the pain of going to a 64 bit OS. There are gains with a 64 bit OS in terms of being able to have more than 4GB of memory in the system without hackish solutions like PAE, also there are some extra registers, but they're not going to help application like Photoshop and Lightroom. The drawbacks in terms of driver support have previously kept many users with a 32 bit Windows OS, and I suspect many people running Vista are running the 32 bit version because it's the more conservative choice.
At the moment, most of the software we'd want to run isn't available in 64 bit versions. 64 bit Windows can run 32 bit applications. Lightroom, Photoshop and the other CS3 applications are all 32 bit - for interesting comments on 64 bit Photoshop see [a href=\"http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/12/64_bitswhen.html]Scott Byer's blog[/url]. Do we really need the availability of more than 4GB of RAM in Photoshop at the moment?
For most photographers, gains like new motherboard / processor architectures with better memory bandwidth will show greater improvements in performance than a 64 bit version of Photoshop would at the moment.
64 bit desktop applications will happen - but it will probably not be for a while yet. It will probably be the next generation of operating systems before we start to see 64 bit desktop applications.
David
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There is a 64 bit version of Vista, but applications that support 64 bit operation are few and far between. Indeed, there was (eventually) a 64 bit version of Windows XP, but it was a white elephant because of lack of drivers.
Driver support is still an issue for 64 bit Vista. 32 bit applications will run on 64 bit Vista, but you must have 64 bit drivers for your hardware, and 64 bit versions of some programs that interact with the OS at a low level, such as antivirus software (the situation is not as bad here as it once was; I use Kaspersky AntiVirus for Windows Workstations, which now has 64 bit support), backup software and defragmentation software.
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Which is why I want PS and LR on Linux. :-) I'm running 64-bit Linux and have no problems. As far
as I can see both MacOS and Linux is a better platform for PS than windows, but if Adobe ported
PS and LR to Linux it would probably only amount to max 5-10% of total sales. And they would probably
see a similar drop in sales on win and mac as most Linux users that use PS probably have a
separate machine or VM to run PS today. So there is probably no economic reason for Adobe to
support Linux beyond wanting to give their customers what they want and need.