A simple Linux / Adobe question

I have a quick question regarding linux and Adobe. Is there any viable way to run Adobe/macromedia products on a linux box (WITHOUT needing a copy of windows?) Has anyone tried it here? Is the speed and reliablity the same as on a Windows box?

As a graphic designer by trade, this is pretty much the only thing holding me back from running a linux box (since I can play WoW in OpenGL ). If this is possible i would love to play around with it on this junker laptop I have right now. If not...then I guess I am still a slave to Microsloth. Thanks for your comments!

 

I found this very interesting article at CNET, also could you give the name of the particular adobe program you use? I know adobe has flash player working in linux but I assume you are probably talking about adobe photoshop.

http://news.com.com/Adobe+dipping+toes+into+desktop+Linux+waters/2100-7344_3-5435397.html

 

well, you could run it in WINE, but obviously the performance wouldn't be the same because of the emulation.

you could always get a Mac... you wouldn't be quite so stinky then

 

WINE is actually not an emulator, it is a virtualizer. An emulator emulates one processor architecture on another, such as emulating a PowerPC processor on an x86. A virtualizer on the other hand creates virtual copies of a processor but the architecture is not changed. (this post was copied from www.linuxrevolution.com)

Virtualizers, in general do not cause a performance lose-in a few cases they have had performance increases-so a virtualizer is not a bad option.

Check out codeweavers, they offer a free trial so you cannot go wrong in giving it a try, though it is $60 a year if you decide to go that route. I am hopping that universal apps made for OSX will be able to transfer to Linux without to much trouble, not likely but possible.


http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/

 

I run Photoshop CS2 and Dreamweaver 8 using WINE, and I see no difference between running it on Windows or Linux. They both installed perfectly, and they both run perfectly.

 

Wow thanks for the answers. I'll look into WINE. BTW, what is probably the easiest distro to install and run with WINE?

Thanks for your help!


Sorry, I'll never be a mac guy (even though I have to use em). I hate how much power microsoft has over my computing world, I can't imagine how much power apple has over theirs considering they sell the OS AND the hardware. Plus, their hardware prices would need to get real before I ever thought of "switching".

 

Wine installs the same on any distro. So whichever you want to use.

 

No, Wine is NOT a virtualizer. That would be something like VMWare or Xen. Wine Is Not an Emulator (We Unix dorks love recursive acronyms...), it's an implementation of the Win32 libraries under Unix-like systems. So it basically lets an application run "native", it's just collecting the functions calls the application makes and implementing them in the X native way.

Anyway, I personally like Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I know they have Wine in their repositories. I'm not sure how well it works with Photoshop, but it should work pretty well. It's one of those "big" apps that they like making work, along with MS Office.

 

My bad, I just looked into it a little more and you are right.