Something has happened in the Linux world that many designers and retouchers had almost given up on: a modern Photoshop has finally been released.
Not the old versions, which were lame and clumsy, but rather new versions, all the way up to Photoshop 2025. And no, Adobe didn’t suddenly fall in love with Linux. It was all thanks to a stubborn and very careful developer.
The problem, as we know, concerns Creative Cloud. Starting with the 2021 version, Photoshop installers are tightly coupled with Windows components, which Wine simply can’t handle by default.
This mainly affected MSHTML and MSXML3 , the Windows system modules responsible for the installer’s HTML/JS interface and parsing XML configuration files. As a result, Linux installations would fail before they even started, and that was usually the end.
But a developer nicknamed PhialsBasement decided to dig deeper and discovered exactly where everything was going wrong. He’s prepared a series of patches for Wine that flawlessly work around issues with strict XML parsing (via CDATA), fix Wine’s ID handling, and, most importantly, make the environment behave as if it were Internet Explorer 9.
This is exactly the behavior Adobe installers from the Creative Cloud era rely on. As a result, the installer interface starts working normally, without crashes, white screens, or strange errors.
And yes, this isn’t just a theory. According to the author, Photoshop 2021 and 2025 run “like clockwork” after installation, without any hiccups or visible issues. They even tried uploading the patches to Valve’s Proton repository, but logically suggested WineHQ first: after all, it’s not a real gaming project.
The developer himself, however, complained about the slowness of Wine’s upstream development, while Valve is usually much faster.
For now, this is mostly a test for the future. To replicate this trick, you’ll need to manually compile Wine using the patches available on PhialsBasement’s GitHub. It’s not the most intuitive option, but the fact itself is significant.
If these changes finally make it into the mainline Wine release, Linux could become much more attractive to professionals who have been clinging to Windows and macOS for years because of Adobe.
And if you don’t want to bother with patches, virtual machines are still a viable option. But for the first time in a long time, it seems that true compatibility between Adobe CC and Linux is no longer a fantasy, but a matter of time.
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