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Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

Hey Dustin, thanks for the follow-up!

In your original story, I posted a request for Canonical to come up with some viable strategy to get Adobe CS (and related color-calibration HW/SW) usable on Ubuntu.

I expected a lot of traction for that suggestion, because AFAICT a lot of creative professionals are looking for a way to escape the Windows/Mac duopoly.

However, it looks like my suggestion didn't make the cut for the list you just posted.

Can you share any thoughts on why getting Adobe CS usable on Ubuntu is / isn't a strategic priority for Canonical?

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Hey there! Thanks for the suggestion.

We're engaging with dozens of major vendors of traditional/proprietary software about delivering their software onto Ubuntu via Snaps -- which is a new packaging format that solves many of the traditional problems associated with proprietary software working well on Linux.

I'm going to ask Evan Dandrea and Michael Hall from Canonical to engage with Adobe around CS and anything else in their suite that might make sense to Snap.

Cheers! @dustinkirkland

I think for many web front-end developers, the only thing keeping them on Mac, is not being able to use Adobe tools on Linux.

If we were in the same room right now, I'd give you, Evan, and Michael all a big hug. We'd all feel awkward afterwards. It would be worth it.

But seriously, thanks for giving it some consideration. Fingers crossed.

I'm sure there are so many web devs, myself included, who would use Ubuntu professionally if only tools like Adobe and Sketch worked on it.

I know it's not directly Ubuntu's problem, but solving this problem will go a looooong way towards developer adoption.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 works almost perfectly in wine, but Photoshop CC isn't working. Probably, it can be fixed easily.

You can create a snap with Wine and a windows application together, which is one route this might go. However, because Photoshop isn't open source, we wouldn't have a legal ability to distribute it.

I'll have to disagree with you there. There are still many bugs and it's slower than on Windows.

I would much prefer to have it without installing Wine.

Hey there, Dustin asked me to chime in. We would of course love to have Adobe's software available to Ubuntu users, and would do whatever we could to help make that happen.

However, as far as I know there is no Linux port of these products, which really limits our ability to even start on it. Likewise the software license limits our ability to share it without Adobe's approval even if we could package it. The best thing that Canonical can do, and indeed what we are doing now, is to provide stable platform for Adobe to target and the tools to make it as easy as possible for them to do that.

Ultimately the only thing that will sway Adobe are their own customers showing a demand for those products on Ubuntu. The more they hear from Ubuntu users who want to buy their software, or people who have bought their software who want to use it on Ubuntu, the more willing they will be do make it happen. And when they're ready, Canonical will make sure that Ubuntu is an inviting and worthwhile platform for them to distribute their software on.

What I want is not free Photoshop on every Ubuntu CD. Instead, work on WINE! Devote engineers to fixing bugs in WINE that block the latest versions of Creative Cloud from running. If WINE was rock solid stable for creative applications -- and promoted as so by Canonical -- I think you'd see many more people switching.

If you can sell Windows applications (with WINE included) in your store, that's all the better.

a lot of purists explicitly hate that idea, and I can understand why. I'm not for or against it, myself.

Thanks for chiming in!

> The best thing that Canonical can do, and indeed what we are doing now, is to provide stable platform for Adobe to target and the tools to make it as easy as possible for them to do that.

There's one more thing which you guys can perhaps do that the rest of us cannot:

Canonical is well-enough known that you may be able to get a meeting with someone at Adobe, to find out what they think would convince them to pilot a Ubuntu-compatible release of CS (or at least Photoshop and Lightroom).

I assume that it's some combination of projected sales revenue, and ease porting / maintenance / support.

If someone (perhaps Canonical) can get Adobe to throw out a number regarding how much sales revenue they'd need for a port, we could use something like Kickstarter to line up the first round of purchasers as well as demonstrate the amount of (pent up) demand.

> There's nothing in their license

... that's not a suggestion for you, but we should probably set up a pirate PPA with already-cracked versions of Adobe software, ported to Linux. It's evil, but it proves that the demand exists and would allow developers to work of Linux.

I think it is important for us as a community to make it clear to Adobe that there is a market for this.

I am a creative professional and dev, my father is a professional photographer and we have traditionally been a mac shop with a huge spend on their hardware.

Their latest offering is driving a lot of us to machines such as the Dell XPS 13 (which I purchased instead of a MBP).

I dearly want the same experience I get with OS X - but the one thing you are missing is a good experience with Adobe.

We've got professionals escaping the Apple ecosystem successfully to Ubuntu, but this is the one sticking point. I bet a lot of people would jump ship to your platform and give it a massive boost if you could get Adobe to put money into it. It would have more effect than any other effort in driving people towards Ubuntu.

Adobe CS is proprietary software owned by Adobe. What do you propose Canonical do? What makes you think there exists any viable strategy that Canonical could follow?

As I have said before - the second there is even a rumor that Adobe would allow (license wise) for their products to run outside Win/Mac, the correct business decision for apple would be to buy Adobe and ensure that hole is closed very quickly.

Would be great to have Lightroom / Photoshop CC work on Ubuntu. Not as interested in Premiere, as DaVinci Resolve comes in a Linux flavor.

Also any chance we get solid support for Wacom on there as well?

I fear there'd have to be some sort of deal-with-the-devil thing to make that happen. Is getting subscription based desktop software into the Linux ecosystem a good precedent to set? Maybe there are already examples of it but certainly not at the Adobe CS scale. I think Ubuntu could better serve the community by paying talented developers to work on an alternative.

Reinventing the wheel is almost never a better option, especially not when the users are actually happy with the current option.

There is no way to replace Adobe tools easily.

It's definitely worth it to try and get Adobe tools working on Linux.

I'll donate $100 to Canonical if they can convince them to offer a one-time-fee option and I don't even use Adobe products.

How much of that work would fall on the shoulders of Adobe, rather than Canonical?

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