A community developer has released a patched version of Wine that enables Adobe Photoshop installers to run on Linux, addressing a long-standing compatibility issue. The fix targets problems in Adobe's Creative Cloud installers and has been tested with Photoshop 2021 and 2025. While promising, the patch awaits integration into the main Wine project.
The challenge of running Adobe Creative Cloud applications on Linux has long deterred users from switching to the platform. A recent breakthrough comes from a community developer who has published a patchset and prebuilt binaries for Wine, claiming successful installation of Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025.
The patch addresses failures in Adobe's installers, which depend on legacy Windows components that Wine previously emulated poorly. Specifically, it improves Wine's mshtml and msxml3 components. Changes include adjustments to JavaScript dispatch, DOM event attributes, and COM behavior in mshtml to align with Internet Explorer expectations used by Adobe's installer interface. Additionally, it relaxes XML parsing in msxml3 to accept malformed structures that Windows tolerates but earlier Wine versions rejected, preventing mid-installation crashes.
In a Reddit post, the developer shared that Photoshop 2021 "runs butter smooth," though noting drag-and-drop issues possibly linked to Wayland. A short video clip demonstrates a completed installation.
The work was submitted as a pull request to Valve's Wine tree, used for Proton in gaming. However, a Valve maintainer closed it, recommending upstream evaluation in Wine before any backports. A reviewer marked it as "LGTM" (Looks Good To Me) and directed the developer to WineHQ's GitLab for submission.
For now, this remains an experimental effort. Its future depends on acceptance into upstream Wine, potentially broadening Linux compatibility for Adobe software.
