Photoshop 2025 Installs on Linux, but Wine Still Forks

Adobe Photoshop 2025 can install on Linux through patched Wine after a developer fixed the Creative Cloud installer’s XML and HTML stack. Photoshop 2021 is the version that actually runs well.

Work through August 2026 shows that front door was the start. Each later Adobe screen hit another missing Windows call, and the build people can run is still a Proton tree, not stock Wine.

The Installer That Wanted Internet Explorer 9

Adobe never shipped Photoshop for Linux. For years the workaround was an old copy of Photoshop CS6 or Creative Cloud 2015, or a Windows install copied into a Wine prefix by hand. The official Creative Cloud setup program would not finish, because it still talks to the OS the way Internet Explorer 9 did.

On January 15, 2026, the GitHub user PhialsBasement opened Valve Wine pull request 310 against Valve’s Wine tree. The note was blunt: the Creative Cloud installer failed on several Wine gaps in mshtml and msxml3, and with those patched, Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 both completed setup.

The installer is not a simple file copy. It draws its UI in Microsoft’s old HTML engine, runs JavaScript against the OS, and feeds XML manifests into MSXML. Wine’s copies of those pieces were close enough for many apps and not close enough for Adobe.

THE FIVE INSTALLER FIXES

• Dynamic DISPIDs: Wine was handing some HTML property IDs to jscript, which does not understand them, and that broke the installer’s JSObject bridge.
• IE9 event attributes: onclick and onload on elements now go through Wine’s own event path in IE9-or-later mode, because Gecko would not fire them.
• String handlers: Event code set as a string is compiled into a real function instead of sitting unused on the element.
• NodeList interfaces: NodeList no longer exposes a JSObject property that the rest of the DOM stack did not mean to advertise.
• CDATA wrap: Embedded XML that Windows MSXML swallows and libxml2 rejects is wrapped before parse, which stopped E103 failures at about 30% of setup.

The msxml3 change is the one that matches the two products. Photoshop 2021’s installer embeds extra <?xml?> declarations inside elements. Photoshop 2025 stuffs XML into *XMLData nodes that should be treated as text. Windows lets that through. Wine, sitting on libxml2, did not. The patch added 414 lines to dlls/msxml3/domdoc.c to detect both patterns and wrap them.

Valve Closed the Request the Same Day

The patches went to Valve first, not to WineHQ. That is how a lot of Wine work travels in 2026: Proton is the tree people actually run, so a fix for a Windows app lands there and hopes for a backport later.

Hello @PhialsBasement, you’ve come across a downstream fork of wine. This pull request should be evaluated and merged upstream before considering if it should be backported to Proton.

kisak-valve, Valve Wine maintainer, GitHub pull request 310

kisak-valve closed the request on January 15, 2026. Another reviewer wrote that the code looked fine and told the author to open it on WineHQ’s GitLab instead. A third asked for regression tests against Wine’s Windows test suite, which the two commits did not include.

That bounce is the process, not a veto. Valve will not carry a non-game HTML and XML patch until upstream Wine has taken it, or at least looked at it. The author had already posted binaries, so testers could unpack a tree the same week, but the merge path ran through WineHQ.

Adobe and a short list of anti-cheat games are still the pair that keep many shops on Windows. A Wine patch that only lives in Proton would have helped Steam users and left everyone else compiling by hand, which is why the close mattered even if it felt slow.

Which Photoshop Versions Run?

Photoshop 2021 installs and, in the author’s own testing, runs. Photoshop 2025 installs. Photoshop 2024 needed a later stub after it aborted on a missing user32 call. Those are three different outcomes, and mixing them into one “Photoshop on Linux” line is how the January posts oversold the week.

PhialsBasement wrote that Photoshop 2021 “runs butter smooth,” with drag-and-drop as the only snag, and even that might have been Wayland on that machine. Other testers had a harder time with Photoshop 2025 after setup, which matches a product that only just got through its own installer.

PHOTOSHOP ON THE PATCHED BUILDS

This is not an Adobe-supported Linux port. A Creative Cloud login, plugin set, GPU path, or font stack can still fail on a machine that got through Set-up.exe. The useful claim is narrower: the official Windows installer can finish under a patched Wine, and Photoshop 2021 is the build with a real runtime report attached.

Nine Days Later, the Patches Hit Staging

Wine 11.1 opened the post-11.0 cycle around January 23, 2026. Wine-Staging 11.1 followed on January 24, nine days after the Valve request, and carried the Adobe installer work for wider testing. Staging is the tree that holds patches upstream has not taken yet, so that was the first time the fix lived outside one person’s GitHub fork.

A Debian packager writing as morgwai applied the same patches to unofficial ntsync Wine 11 packages for Debian 13 and asked for testers, because that packager does not own Adobe software. Extra commits that landed after the Valve request closed, including an empty-string MSXML fix for Collection installers and an IXMLSerializer fix for dropdown values, were not all in that first Staging drop.

In February 2026, Wine developer Jacek Caban split an XMLSerializer implementation in MSHTML out of a larger Adobe-installer series. Alexandre Julliard merged it into Wine Git ahead of Wine 11.3. As of February 11, three other patches from that series were still waiting. That is progress with a remainder, not a full landing.

The January Wine patches for Photoshop were the public breakthrough. Staging and the XMLSerializer merge are what happened next, and they still left a gap between “the installer can run” and “stock Wine is enough.”

FROM THE FIRST PATCH TO THE AUGUST FORK

1. January 15, 2026: PhialsBasement opens the Valve Wine request; kisak-valve closes it the same day and points at WineHQ.
2. January 24, 2026: Wine-Staging 11.1 ships the installer patches for testing.
3. February 2026: XMLSerializer lands in upstream Wine Git; three related patches remain open.
4. May 31, 2026: wine-11.10-adobe adds xml2, msvcrt, and d2d1 fixes; dwrite lag is still listed.
5. August 12, 2026: proton-10.0-adobe ships as a full Proton 10.0 tree with more Adobe stubs.

That calendar is the second half of the story. The January installer work did not freeze. New crashes showed up once people could get past setup, and the author kept rebasing a private tree to catch them.

Four Extra Fixes in the August Proton Build

On May 31, 2026, PhialsBasement published wine-11.10-adobe, a WoW64 Wine 11.10 with three changes over stock. libs/xml2 learned to tolerate embedded XML declarations in Adobe manifests. msvcrt stopped a NULL dereference in _FindAndUnlinkFrame that crashed Photoshop 2021. d2d1 started drawing geometry realizations to bitmap targets, which had been a no-op. The notes still flagged a dwrite font and locale loop that made startup slow and the central UI lag.

On August 12, 2026, 209 days after the first Valve request, the same account shipped Proton 10.0 Adobe installer builds. The tag is proton-10.0-adobe. It restores an older bleeding-edge-local tree, rebuilt for current toolchains (binutils 2.44 or newer, FFmpeg 8), with esync and fsync on, one Wine binary for 32-bit and 64-bit, and two tarballs: a plain Wine prefix and a Steam compatibility tool named Proton Adobe.

That August tree is not a reprint of the January HTML patches. It adds an MSI combobox value fix, a SetWindowFeedbackSetting stub that stops a Photoshop 2024 abort, and winedmo plus winebuild build fixes. Once the installer ran, Photoshop 2024 died on a user32 call Wine did not stub. Photoshop 2021 still needed the msvcrt crash fix. Direct2D drawing was silently doing nothing for some geometry.

If you want one folder that installs Creative Cloud and then launches these apps, that Proton 10.0 tarball is still the packaged answer. Wine-Staging absorbed the original installer work in January. Upstream took XMLSerializer in February. The runtime holes that showed up later still live in a fork.

Bug 47015 Sat Open Since 2019

None of this started in 2026. Wine’s Photoshop CC 2019 login screen bug was opened in 2019, 7 years before the Valve request. Fabian Maurer confirmed it against Wine 4.5. The login window needed winetricks corefonts just to appear. The workaround was winetricks msxml3, then a pile of native 32-bit Internet Explorer DLLs (ieframe, iertutil, jscript, mshtml, msls31, urlmon) copied in as overrides.

That recipe is the old shape of the same problem. Adobe’s cloud apps render a login and a setup UI through Microsoft HTML and XML. Wine’s built-in copies were not a full Internet Explorer, so testers swapped in the real DLLs and hoped the rest of the app would start. PhialsBasement’s 2026 work is the attempt to make Wine’s own mshtml and msxml3 take that load, so a Linux box does not have to import Internet Explorer to finish Set-up.exe.

Staging 11.1 cited that same bug when it took the new patches. The 2019 login screen and the 2026 E103 at about 30% are one line of missing XML and HTML behavior, stretched across Creative Cloud 2019, 2021, and 2025. Copying a Windows install into a prefix hid the installer. It never taught Wine how Adobe writes XML.

The Other Adobe Apps Wait Behind the Same Door

Creative Cloud is one setup program in front of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and the rest. If that setup program runs, the door is open. It is not a port of those apps. No public runtime log from this tree puts Illustrator or Premiere in the same “butter smooth” bucket as Photoshop 2021, and Photoshop 2025 still has fewer honest day-to-day reports than the 2021 build.

People who actually edit photos on Linux have not been waiting on a press cycle. They kept Photoshop CS6 under Wine, or they stayed on Windows, or they tried GIMP and bounced. Months after the installer news, that split is still there, because a custom Proton tarball is not a distro package and Adobe still does not list Linux as a supported desktop.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Installer: Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 can complete Creative Cloud setup on the patched trees.
• Runtime: Photoshop 2021 has the strongest firsthand report; Photoshop 2024 needed the August user32 stub.
• Upstream: XMLSerializer is in Wine Git; Staging took the January installer patches on January 24, 2026.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Stock Wine: Whether a plain Wine 11.x from a distro, with no Adobe fork, now installs and runs these builds end to end.
• The rest of CC: Whether Illustrator, Premiere Pro, or After Effects get through the same door in usable form.
• dwrite: Whether the font and locale loop that lagged the May 11.10 build has been fixed in a later tree.

The August 12 proton-10.0-adobe tarball is still the single download that bundles the installer work, the Photoshop 2024 stub, and a Steam compat tool. Unpack it, point it at Set-up.exe, and you are running a Proton fork that learned, the hard way, that Adobe’s next screen always asks for one more Windows function.