14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has just announced that it's going to offer its Photoshop suite on Chromebooks, and that sounds like a good idea, but it also means that they could make this happen on Linux as well. They just don't want to.
Adobe is a very big company and it used to be even bigger. Its products shaped the market and not the other way around. The Linux platform has been itching to get its fingers on products like Photoshop or Adobe Premiere for years, but this particular architecture holds no interest for Adobe.
If that wasn't enough, most of the their products no longer have Linux versions. Soon enough, the Adobe Linux support will end and a big part of the open source community will be glad. Still, very few users don't accept the fact that Photoshop, for example, is head and shoulder above anything that can be found on Linux and that is troublesome.
Adobe Photoshop on Chromebooks is now a thing
Now, it looks like Google and Adobe are in a closer partnership that would allow Chromebook owners to be a part of the Project Photoshop Streaming. This is what they say about it: "Project Photoshop Streaming enables selected participants to access Photoshop on Chromebooks. Applications delivered via streaming are easy to access and easy to manage. Even better, streaming apps work directly with files in Google Drive, so no need to download and re-upload files - just edit directly in the cloud."
There are all sorts of restrictions for who can use this new service and it's a rather complicated process to even get to use it, but that is beside the point. If you want to know more about Project Photoshop Streaming, you should check out our initial report.
The problem is that Chromebooks are actually running a Linux distribution, more or less. The Chromebooks are powered by a distro called ChromeOS. It used to be based on Ubuntu, if you can believe that, but now it's based on Gentoo Linux. ChromeOS doesn't use a Linux kernel per se, but a modified version of the one published by the Linux foundation.
There is nothing stopping Adobe from providing the same kind of service for Linux distros as well, but there is no one to enter in a partnership with. The Linux platform is actually a conglomerate of people and projects, with no single leader that could convince Adobe to make this move. From what we've seen so far in regard to their support for Linux, they just don't want to do it.
Do people really need Adobe products?
This particular fact can be disputed. Some of the products from the company won't be missed on Linux, like the Adobe Reader, Flash, or Adobe Air. The Linux platform is doing just fine without them. As for other products, like Photoshop or Premiere, as a Linux user I would love to have them.
These kinds of applications are always cited by people who don't want to adopt Linux and ditch Windows, and they are right to do so. It seems ironic that a company that doesn't want to have anything to do with Linux could, in fact, determine a lot of people to adopt the platform.