The long-standing incompatibility between Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite and Linux operating systems continues to pose a significant barrier for users to migrate to open source platforms.
Recent developments suggest that this barrier may be gradually weakening due to targeted engineering work, as a developer called PhialsBasement has documented a method to install and run current versions of Photoshop, specifically versions 2021 and 2025, on Linux systems.
This process bypasses the official installation path, which Adobe has limited to Windows and macOS environments.
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The biggest challenge lies in the complex architecture of the Adobe Creative Cloud installer, which depends on certain Windows subsystems that Linux does not provide natively.
Wine’s compatibility layer translates Windows API calls into POSIX-compatible calls, but has traditionally had problems with these installers. The main points of failure were MSHTML and MSXML3.
These components represent the HTML and JavaScript interface of the installer and parse its XML configuration files.
The installation framework expects an environment that mimics previous Internet Explorer behavior, which standard Wine configurations cannot adequately reproduce. The fix introduces a number of fixes that change the way Wine interacts with these subsystems.
To address XML parsing issues, the patches encapsulate data in CDATA sections to avoid strict parsing errors on Linux and also fix Wine’s internal handle handling so that system calls are routed and executed correctly.
An important part of the solution forces Wine to emulate the event handling behavior of Internet Explorer 9. This allows the installer interface to work as the developers intended.
According to reports from the developers, these changes allow the installation process to complete without errors and the application to run stably.
This advancement gives Linux users access to Photoshop as a powerful image editor. It also suggests that other Adobe applications, including video editing software, could run on Linux in the future.
The developer initially submitted the patches to Valve’s Proton repository, a fork of Wine optimized for gaming, but the maintainers rejected them and suggested submitting them through WineHQ.
Therefore, users who want to use this method must manually compile a patched version of Wine from the developer’s source code.
Despite the technical prowess, the path taken by these fixes highlights the fragmented nature of compatibility development.
The process requires technical knowledge, which limits its practical scope and gives it greater symbolic value than its immediate widespread application.
This work shows that the barriers blocking professional authoring software on Linux are not insurmountable and that early introduction of these patches could improve access to other Adobe applications.
Currently, Linux users have to rely on unofficial patches due to the lack of native support.
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