I have been using Darktable and transitioning away from Adobe’s Lightroom. However, I have almost a decade of edits and experience with Lightroom so doing a cold-turkey switch is proving to be challenging. So I decided to investigate if I could “natively” run Lightroom (without a VM) so I decided to give wine a try.

I use guix as a package manager on Pop!_OS and guix has wine but it did a while to build and install. I needed to download a Lightroom Classic executable but like a lot of software it’s an installer that does the downloading and installing. However, Adobe won’t allow you to download a Windows installer on Linux, so I had to use User-Agent Switcher on Firefox to Windows to even get the installer… this is part of the frustration of software you lease.

wine will ask to install mono installer, which is does by itself and then the same thing with Gecko installer. Overall a pretty smooth process but the Adobe installer failed miserably with a less than helpful error.

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Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1]: Potential driver version mismatch ignored due to missing DLLs 0.0.0.0 and 0.0.0.0 (t=18.9854
) [GFX1]: Potential driver version mismatch ignored due to missing DLLs 0.0.0.0 and 0.0.0.0

At this point I didn’t have high hopes for avoiding the Windows VM route but wanted to give a quick try to CrossOver. I tried one of their supported applications (Notepad++) and that worked great. They also support “unlisted application” but pointing the Adobe installer led to a lot of nothing, the logs were not very helpful either. At this point I decided to abandon this path and go the VM route to make progress on my actual photo editing goals. However, Steam’s Proton(updated to link to Proton-GE) could be a option to investigate in the future. Are there any other good solutions?