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Ask HN: Why Won't Adobe Release for Linux?

5 points by ethanpil ↗ HN
I certainly understand why Microsoft and Apple keep their best and most profitable apps proprietary to their own platforms. What I don't understand is Adobe... They already have a Unixy codebase for Mac and the argument of profitability of the work due to lack of users doesn't cut it with me. Just do a search and you will find users like myself pining for the day they release on Linux so we don't need to keep windows or macs around. I'd love to explore why with the HN community...

11 comments

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Someone
Their Mac codebase likely isn’t that Unixy.

Also, Acrobat Reader has been available for Linux (https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-adobe-acrobat-reader-...).

I guess they abandoned that because of the support load required (supporting Linux can be hard because of the proliferation of distributions with different directory layouts, font engines, etc. Most users may be on one of at most a handful distributions, but the few that aren’t can cause high support costs)

ethanpil
I think much of this has been solved with systems like appimage and snap. While they are not super Linuxy or in the spirit of the community, people have come to understand why companies with a huge investment into proprietary IP like Adobe would only invest in Linux with something like these available to them.
PaulHoule
X Windows.

GUI toolkits on Linux are in bad shape. The GUI toolkits for the Mac have nothing to do with Unix.

Windows has been through more widget sets than I can name, but has hidden that from the average non-observant muggle. On Linux they get some widget set to almost work, then make a new version that breaks things and repeat the cycle. Font metrics are all wrong so that text renders on top of other text but nobody seems to care. GUI toolkit developers are notorious for being unresponsive to user concerns. (e.g. a bug in GTK that prevented GTK apps from working right on a Windows X server that draws individual windows was marked as 'don't fix' because the developers think Microsoft is evil and you are too if you use Windows)

On top of that, Adobe might be able to get their product to work on a particular release of Ubuntu, but Linux advocates won't be pleased with that, it has to be whatever version of whatever distro they use.

Adobe right doesn't want to get involved in that s-tshow.

ethanpil
Even if they only release for one distro to start I'm sure they can find one that is popular enough. Especially with some financial incentive from the distro maker... It would probably make the distro instantly more popular...
lovelearning
While the issues you point out may be correct, the existence of popular cross-platform and cross-distro graphics software like Blender and Krita suggests that they're solvable.
thayne
I doubt there is very much usage of builtin widgets in CC, from what I've seen the UI in photoshop and indesign doesn't look like native widgets. Now, that's not to say that they don't use OS-specific API's, they probably make heavy use of DirectX and maybe Metal, but I don't think the widget toolkits would be a big blocker for most of adobe's products.
gcbw3
DRM and copy protection.

Or more correctly, lack of rootkit capabilities to enforce such.

The main difference of osx/windows from linux, is that on the formers you (the end user) do not control the kernel.

ethanpil
In this case, the truth is that Adobe CC has been cracked on both Mac and Windows, so whatever they are doing is pretty useless. I'm sure they can bake in something that will work on Linus and also eventually get cracked as well.
zzeroo
I think this is the only answer.