Developer Claims Photoshop Installers Now Work on Linux Using Wine

The inability to use Adobe Creative Cloud on Linux is often cited as a major barrier for many users considering a switch to the platform. But perhaps, just perhaps, there has already been a breakthrough in that direction.

A community developer says they have resolved long-standing Wine compatibility issues that prevented Adobe Creative Cloud installers from completing on Linux, publishing a patchset and prebuilt binaries that they claim enable installation of Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025.

The patch targets failures in Adobe’s Creative Cloud–era installers, which rely on legacy Windows components that Wine has historically struggled to emulate accurately.

On Reddit, the author reported that Photoshop 2021 “runs butter smooth,” while noting drag-and-drop issues that may be related to Wayland. The post is accompanied by a short clip showing a successfully finished installation.

The work was posted as a pull request against Valve’s downstream Wine tree (primarily used for Proton development). According to the PR, the fixes focus on Wine’s mshtml and msxml3 implementations, components that Adobe’s installers rely on.

The developer adjusted how Wine handles JavaScript dispatch, DOM event attributes, and COM behavior in mshtml to better match Internet Explorer–style expectations used by Adobe’s installer UI.

In addition, the patch relaxes XML parsing behavior in msxml3 to tolerate malformed or non-standard XML structures that Windows accepts but Wine previously rejected, a known cause of installer crashes partway through installation.

However, a Valve maintainer closed the PR, replying that it should be evaluated and merged upstream in Wine before Proton backports are considered. Another reviewer described the patch as “LGTM” (a common shorthand in software development that means “Looks Good To Me”) and pointed the author to WineHQ’s GitLab for an upstream submission.

So, for now, the patch remains an experimental, community-driven effort. Its long-term impact will depend on whether the changes are accepted into upstream Wine.