How Adobe Photoshop Got Working on Linux: The Wine Patches Behind It
For twelve years, trying to run the Adobe Creative Cloud installer under Wine got you nothing. Not a crash with a useful message — the installer UI simply refused to work, which meant no Photoshop on Linux short of a virtual machine. I patched Wine's MSXML3 and MSHTML to fix it. Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 now install and run on Linux, the patches were merged into Wine-Staging 11.1, and Phoronix covered it twice.
Why the Adobe installer never worked under Wine
The Creative Cloud installer isn't a normal Win32 app. Its UI is an embedded HTML/JavaScript application rendered through MSHTML (the Internet Explorer engine), and its configuration is parsed through MSXML3. The installer was written in the IE9 era and expects IE9-era behavior from both.
Wine's implementations disagreed with that expectation in a few specific places:
- MSXML3 parsing was stricter than the real thing. Adobe's XML config files contain data that native MSXML3 tolerates but Wine's parser rejected. The fix wraps the offending data in CDATA so it survives parsing the way it does on Windows.
- Element ID handling didn't match IE. The installer's JavaScript looks up and manipulates elements in ways that depended on IE's ID resolution quirks. Wine resolved them differently, so script calls never reached their targets and the UI silently died.
- Event handling had to behave like IE9. The patches force Wine's MSHTML into the event model the installer was written against, so button clicks and page transitions actually fire.
None of these bugs produced obvious errors. That's a big part of why the issue survived for over a decade: the installer just sat there, and the failure was buried in the interaction between two large emulated subsystems.
What runs today
With the patches, the Creative Cloud installer completes, and Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 install and launch. Photoshop 2021 runs what I would describe as butter smooth. Remaining known issues are minor: drag-and-drop has some rough edges under Wayland.
The patches were first opened against Valve's Wine tree, then picked up by Wine-Staging 11.1 — the staging tree that ships experimental patches to users for wider testing — with upstream WineHQ inclusion still pending. If you're on a distribution that packages wine-staging, version 11.1 or later has them.
Press coverage, and one funny credit
Phoronix ran two articles: one when the Creative Cloud installer fix landed, and a follow-up when Photoshop 2025 was confirmed installing. Tom's Hardware, How-To Geek, and others followed. VideoCardz credited the whole thing to "a redditor," which — after patching two COM subsystems in Wine — is the kind of headline you frame.
FAQ
- Can I run Photoshop on Linux natively?
- There's no native Linux Photoshop. But with Wine-Staging 11.1+, the Adobe Creative Cloud installer works and Photoshop 2021/2025 install and run under Wine — no virtual machine needed.
- Which Photoshop versions work under Wine?
- Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 are confirmed installing and running with the patched Wine. 2021 is the smoothest.
- Do I need to patch Wine myself?
- Not anymore. The patches shipped in Wine-Staging 11.1, so installing wine-staging ≥ 11.1 from your distribution is enough.
- What was actually broken?
- Wine's MSXML3 rejected Adobe's XML configs that native MSXML3 tolerates, and Wine's MSHTML didn't reproduce the IE9 element-ID and event behavior the installer's embedded HTML/JS UI depends on.