someone wrote:
Simon Budig posted:
So the main thing to do would probably be to port their GUI toolkit (portability layer) to X11 or a GUI toolkit on top of X11 and they’re done. A little bit of extra stuff for the Filesystem (not too hard probably, since MacOS X already *is* a Unix) and you have Photoshop for Linux. I don’t think it’d be that difficult.
so adobe can’t just take the osx version and use it for bsd?
Well, as Tacit already pointed out, there are a lot of proprietary APIs for MacOS X out there, and apps using them are not necessarily ported easily (However, since Adobe already covers two different proprietary APIs it might be easy to add a third, especially when they encapsulated the differences in their codebase properly [1]).
The other option would be to go Corels way and use WINE to basically run your windows executable on Linux. IMHO the wrong approach, because you still operate on the cruft-laden windows API and suffer from potential WINE bugs/incompatibilities…
does wine still need windows os?
No, you can run a lot of applications without an Windows install. But the coverage of the Windows API is AFAIK not 100% (I don’t have much experience with WINE).
As outlined above I don’t think it’d be that hard. But Adobe most probably does not see the market. Windows is an obvious market, MacOS is a historically grown market, but there are not that much professional-as-in-earning-money artists that operate on Linux.
if adobe is willing to look to the future, a possible migration of users to linux is inevitable. many legitimate small and medium businesses plus honest users are dissatisfied with the activation model. what’s holding them back from jumping ship? availability of their favourite apps on linux. I submit that the vendors who begin shipping product for linux sans activation will see an increase in their market share in the medium term.
[I am not sure if I got that right? Do you suggest that Adobe should ship a Linux version of Photoshop without their activation scheme? Does not sound very understandable, except when they want to promote Linux…]
I believe it is not easy to try to analyze companies strategies wrt to Linux. I certainly do not understand why Adobe ships a linux version of an SVG viewer, that crashes on a regular base with recent versions of Mozilla (because Adobe relied on a certain undocumented behaviour of the Netscape Plugin protocol IIRC). At some point I got the impression, that Adobe wants to push SVG, but this is kind of a slap into the face of a very tech-savvy, early-adopterish and open-standard-friendly community.
However, I have no doubt, that Adobe is able to produce a Linux Photoshop very quickly, when there happens to be a large demand for it.
Bye,
Simon
[1] I am involved in the development of the GIMP, which runs on various Unixes as well as on Windows. Our "compatibility layer" is glib and GTK+. There are very few points in the sourcecode where we have to take care about that.
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