AdobeWine

Adobe Creative Cloud apps on Linux, through a patched Wine.

AdobeWine is Wine 11.18 plus 53 patches. With it, these apps install through Creative Cloud, sign in with a normal Adobe account and run with GPU acceleration: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Audition, Media Encoder and the Creative Cloud desktop app.

Status: early testing (0.1.0). It works well on the reference machine (Arch-based, NVIDIA). It has not yet been tested on other machines, which is where you come in: please try it and report back, good or bad.

Exports were checked against the same exports made on Windows. For example, Photoshop PNG output is pixel-identical, Audition's normalised audio is bit-identical, and Premiere's 4K H.264 export took 9.9 s here against 9.1 s on Windows. Details are in docs/STATUS.md.

Why this exists

I'm not a Wine developer. I needed Adobe's apps for my work and didn't want to keep Windows just for them, so I built this for my own laptop, with a lot of help from Claude, an AI coding assistant. I'm sharing it because many people want to get off both Windows and macOS, keep working with Adobe, and still tinker with their own machines. It has only been tested on one machine so far. Your reports, fixes and criticism are what will make it work for everyone else.

What it is and what it is not

• It is a Wine build: open-source patches on top of upstream Wine (LGPL-2.1-or-later), plus scripts that set up a Wine prefix with DXVK, vkd3d-proton and nvidia-libs.
• It does not include or download any Adobe software. You install Adobe's apps yourself with Adobe's own Creative Cloud installer.
• It does not crack, bypass or modify Adobe licensing. You need your own Creative Cloud subscription and you sign in normally.
• It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by Adobe. "Adobe", "Photoshop", "Illustrator", "Premiere Pro", "Audition" and "Creative Cloud" are trademarks of Adobe Inc., used here only to say which programs this Wine build is meant to run.

Install

• Arch Linux and derivatives (CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, Garuda): the AUR packages adobewine / adobewine-bin are being submitted. Until then, build the same package from this repository (see docs/INSTALL-ARCH.md).
• Any other distribution: build from source. See docs/INSTALL.md.

Once installed, the short version is:

adobewine setup --windows-fonts /path/to/Windows/Fonts  # create the prefix (once)
adobewine run ~/Downloads/Creative_Cloud_Set-Up.exe       # install Creative Cloud, sign in
adobewine fix-signin                                      # if the sign-in window stays blank
adobewine cc                                              # install apps from Creative Cloud
adobewine launchers                                       # add them to your app menu

Which distributions, GPUs and desktops should work: docs/COMPATIBILITY.md. When something breaks: docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md.

How it was made

The patches come from comparing the same Adobe workflows on real Windows and under Wine. API traces, window trees and output files were recorded on Windows, and each difference was fixed in Wine with a small test program. Every patch has a one-line description in docs/PATCHES.md, and docs/HOW-IT-WORKS.md describes the method. Patches 0001-0003 come from PhialsBasement's Adobe installer work for Wine. The rest were written for this project, and we would like to see them upstream in WineHQ.

Help wanted

• Test it on your distribution and GPU, and tell us in a compatibility report.
• Report bugs with a log: adobewine prints where it saved each run's log.
• Patches welcome, especially for AMD and Intel GPUs, other distributions, and upstreaming. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
• Questions and ideas: Discussions.

License

The patches and scripts are licensed under the GNU LGPL 2.1 or later, the same as Wine (see LICENSE). DXVK, vkd3d-proton, nvidia-libs, wine-gecko and wine-mono are downloaded from their own projects and keep their own licenses.