Redditor discovers fix for Creative Cloud installer, making Adobe Photoshop installs finally possible on Linux
An open-source developer has posted Wine patches that remove one of the last blockers for Adobe Creative Cloud installers on Linux. With the patched Wine build, Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Adobe Photoshop 2025 are reported to install under Linux.
The work is credited to the developer “PhialsBasement”, and targets Wine incompatibilities in MSXML3 and MSHTML that were breaking the Windows installer flow. Early reports suggest the app side looks usable for at least one older release.
PhialsBasement wrote: “Photoshop 2021 itself runs butter smooth, only issue i have had is drag-n-drop but that could just be my wayland stuff.”
Source: PhialsBasement
The pull request was opened against ValveSoftware/wine first, but Valve maintainer kisak-valve responded that this is “a downstream fork of wine” and asked for upstream Wine evaluation before any Proton backport discussion. The PR was then closed, with another maintainer comment pointing to WineHQ’s GitLab for an upstream submission.
This fix can push more people toward Linux, because the hardest part for many users has been getting Creative Cloud apps installed in the first place. If the installer becomes reliable in upstream Wine or common Wine builds, Linux stops feeling like a dead end for users who only need a specific Photoshop version.
One thing to remember is that this is an unofficial path that depends on Wine behavior, desktop environment quirks, GPU and font stacks, plugin compatibility, and Adobe’s own update cadence. Even if Photoshop opens and edits fine, workflows that rely on licensing, cloud sync, camera raw pipelines, color-critical output, or third-party extensions still tend to be safer on Windows or macOS.
Source: Reddit , Valve Wine (Github) , Phoronix
