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photography by Kristel van Beek
25 Feb: Why (especially Adobe) and other companies should support Linux
posted by: martijn, at 25 February 2007 23:06 GMT+1, 7 January 2008 22:34 GMT+1
If Flash, Flex, Photoshop etc where ported to Linux I would switch immediately. The last 2 weeks I tried to work in Ubuntu Edgy. Besides all the wonderful applications already installed by the default installation I miss the Adobe products (and default support for my wireless network adapter).Using Wine is an option but still not stable or fast and getting CS2 to work was undoable (for me that is).Write a comment for this article
But why isn’t Adobe supporting Linux? Main reason I could find was the diversity of Linux distributions and desktop managers which leads to a diversity in frameworks to choose from like a sound manager alsa or oss etc.
For the Linux distributions part I would suggest that it would a matter of choice because every system can simply adept. For instance the apt-get system of Debian/Ubuntu is also installable on Fedora and vice versa of course.
For the window manager part the same is in order. Choosing KDE as platform that’s no real problem for Gnome or XFCE users because it’s just a matter of installing a framework (could we call gtk and qt like that?). For the flash player Adobe choose Motif as gui framework , I still wonder why.
If Adobe would support Linux I would switch with them and my guess is that there are more like me to do so.7 Comments
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Peter Elst says:
at 25 February, 2007 23:43 www.peterelst.comGood post Martijn, though I guess it all boils down to a cost/benefit equation for companies -- at the moment there isn't a huge market of creative professionals (in the Adobe sense of the word) running Linux.Given that, there is little justification for them investing in supporting another OS (particularly because of the initial costs). I've also heard the argument that Linux users wouldn't necessarily be a loyal customer base as many are against the whole concept of proprietary software.I think thats a flawed argument because, as you rightly mention, you would see people switching to Linux and the market would create itself given the availability of software for creative professionals.The good news is that it would take just one market leader to jump on the bandwagon and everyone else will join in. Now the question is, who could that market leader be? I hardly expect it to be Microsoft for obvious reasons so Adobe is pretty much on its own there.I do hope they'll put it on the roadmap for future releases of the Creative Suite products but I'm not very hopeful at the moment. Their money is on Mac, which for many users combines the best of both worlds, and you're seeing a lot of people switching to it from Windows.Given the expertise Adobe already has developing for Mac its unlikely to change any time soon. -
Shunjie says:
at 26 February, 2007 2:31After 2 weeks of trying ubuntu, I switched back to windows because , well, I need to use Flash and wine is not very stable. However, I will be switching to mac in months to come. When people ask me why do you switch to mac? I will answer: Windows Vista. -
Mike Kelp says:
at 26 February, 2007 2:56 www.edomgroup.comI wholeheartedly agree with this post. On many of my machines, I've started running linux already, but have to have windows on a VM to run Photoshop, Flash MX, Flex Builder, and SQL Server Manager (Don't think that one's gonna support linux anytime soon hehe).If adobe made Linux releases available, I would can the entire VM and have one machine running windows maybe so I could use SQL Server Manager...or maybe I would simply do everything in SQL and find another much less feature full tool...Either way I would be very happy with Adobe and probably buy more Adobe software.Mike. -
Martijn van Beek says:
at 26 February, 2007 8:37 martijnvanbeek.netSwitching to Mac I've considered but Mac means different hardware and Apple doesn't offer a laptop with the resolution (1920x1200) I want (and currently have). But it's still an option.Porting Flex Builder to linux won't be a real issue I think (flash 8 runs on Wine). -
Chris H says:
at 26 February, 2007 9:25i too would switch to Linux in a second if the Adobe products I need would run on it (mainly Dreamweaver, Flash, and Photoshop). -
polyGeek says:
at 29 March, 2007 14:46 polyGeek.comI totally agree. I'll switch over to Ubuntu fulltime as soon as I have my CS suite support. I'm hopeful that the new Linux Foundation - IBM, Oracle, Novell, Intel, etc. - will help provide leadership in getting more driver support and such that is needed. Adobe's Apollo might also help since it will bring all those applications to Linux - soon. -
Adam says:
at 7 December, 2007 19:21 www.dustypixels.comI've been using Ubuntu with Eclipse/FDT/FB and running Flash CS3 in XP under VirtualBox for all my professional work for the last few months, it's going great... sure do hope CS3 works natively on Linux one day so I can delete VBox too :)
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