DXO Softwares on LINUX ! (please .....)

So, what exactly is your definition of half-functional? Everything I was doing in Windows, I’m doing over here in Linux. As far as fighting with drivers, you might want to take a step out of the early 2000s, because Linux has come quite a long way. Case in point, I’ve got an RTX2070 card in this rig. Care to take a guess as to how much time I spent ‘fighting’ with drivers? If you answer with: “long enough to check a checkbox, click apply and restart the window manager”, then you’re correct. Total time? Maybe 5 minutes. Oh, and hardware acceleration works great as well.

I’m not out to change anyone’s mind, however, I will correct people when they spread misinformation. Linux isn’t for everyone. It’s not going to be for everyone, and in fact I’m a large proponent of using whatever tool is going to make you the most productive. For some, that’s Windows or Mac, and for others, that’s Linux.

But, we’re steering way off-topic here and no one’s going to change how anyone feels about whatever OS, so I’ll just leave it there. In the future I suggest some research before making statements about an operating system you have limited experiences with.

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I wasted two months of my life with a switching to Linux experiment about eight years ago (Linux Mint, Debian version) and have moved three programmers over to Linux for as long as two years to finally face them imploring me to be allowed to have Macs like everyone else in Foliovision.

Of course, I’m sure you’d like me to run this experiment every year, even every three months as new drivers and flavours and major releases come out. Sorry but no.

The latest hot compatibility issues with Linux I believe are battery performance and power management on laptops, which is poor and/or inconsistent. Well one of my important devices is portable, in fact have both a MBP and a MBA in regular use. Having to babysit and fight poor power management doesn’t sound like a good use of my weekend hours and I pay for my own work hours.

I firmly believe in the Linux mission and actively both support financially and with development hours FOSS every month. But until most of Linux is unified under a single flag with up to date drivers and power management and reliable and attractive utilities, I’ll reluctantly keep on with Mac OS.

If I had to choose at gunpoint Linux or Windows, it would be a difficult decision. I’d much rather deal with Linux (where there’s a chance of privacy) but it would be hard to cut myself off from so much pro level AV software. I’ve not enjoyed my time with the Linux equivalents.

Returning to the matter at hand:

Any mid-tier software publisher who thinks it’s a good idea to publish their commercial software on Linux has come away disappointed. I’d hate to see DxO waste man hours on another dead end project.

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I’d just like Wine support. Maybe have a dev or two take a peek at running in Wine, and if it’s not a lot of work, get it working and provide instructions.

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It’s simply not going to happen for the multitude of reasons mentioned in this thread and others. Are you planning on paying DXO for this casual request of yours for a day of a day two of their developers’ time? They are not just hanging around sitting on their hands. They’re running a formal business for profit and are not a bunch kids experimenting and trying things out on a whim.

Mark

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You have no idea what their priorities are.

Hello guys,

I just want to confirm - Linux is not our priority - it will take a great amount of time and effort to organize the support of the new OS and if we would do that you could forget about new features for a long time. I do not think this is worth to be done now or in the near future.

Regards,
Svetlana G.

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Based on Svetlana’s response, apparently I do have an idea about what their priorities are.

On a separate note, how big do you think the PhotoLab development team is? DXO is a small company. You can probably count the entire number of developers on one hand, and likely you would still have one or more fingers left.

Mark

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Hi Phil,
Sorry I am not a Linux user and I have no idea how Wine works.
Maybe you can check with Wine community to help you and if you have questions contact DxO support in private to see if someone has time to help. But do not be upset if you get a negative answer.
I know Linux is not a priority right now but if it is a small step and someone wanna help you.
In the end that can help DxO too…

Svetlana,

Thanks for clarifying this. There are no surprises at all in your response.

Some Linux fans here seem to think there is no negative impact to a small company like yours diverting limited resources to the development and support of core software onto a new platform. They don’t seem to understand that DXO is running a “for profit” business and that PhotoLab is not freeware.

Porting PhotoLab to Linux would be a poor use of those very limited resources. This is especially true because the potential for adding a large enough number of new PhotoLab users to its current user base, from the limited number of Linux users who would likely be willing to pay for it, would probably be insufficient and not cost effective. Linux users like to point out the large number of people using that platform these days, but that number is still just a blip compared to the combined user base of Windows and IOS. Perhaps at some point in the future things will change.

Mark

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Great. Get a bunch of like-minded people together and get to work on WINE support. No one is stopping you. If at the end of making PhotoLab work on WINE, you find you have a small ask from DxO to improve compatibility, then have your best developer ask for the fix in very precise technical terms.

That’s how WINE compatibility is normally built, by people who want it, not by the original development team.

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From what I understand, photolab is built on windows presentation foundation, a tech created by microsoft as “the” windows GUI framework for a few years a decade or so ago (or at least in their view). But the problem with it is that it has many native windows calls, so it seems wine doesn’t support any WPF apps at all.

MS has started porting and open sourcing a lot of .net libraries to “.net core”, which will be the base for .net 5, and has the possibility to build both windows and linux binaries, but even though support for WPF was added in it recently, that part (wpf) of core is just for windows due to the native calls, and doesn’t support linux. And it doesn’t seem like it will change on the MS side either in the near future (otherwise I’m guessing dxo will be forced to or choose to migrate to .net core sooner or later, but since just using the windowsonly wpf-variant means by far the least effort, that won’t change the compatibility outlook for linux)

I think it would be interesting to start a page like go fund me. Where you set a financial goal and see how much real interest there is. Cost of bringing someone new on for a fixed term contract to work for a set amount of time or something.

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Even if you could raise the funding, then there would be the question of finding and training the extra developers required to carry out the work without distracting the existing team from all they are involved in.

As I said earlier, the timescale for something deemed “simple” is often far beyond the imagination of those who use the product.

An average daily rate for a macOS developer is around £500 per day so, for a year’s work (conservative estimate of time required), you would easily be looking at around £250k for two developers.

How many man-hours do you think it has taken to get the present product to where it is today?

And don’t think you can get away with less experienced developers for less. An example is the junior developer on a project on which I was consulting; the project manager delegated them to write a relatively simple algorithm. After three weeks, I tried to integrate their code, only to find that it was not only badly written code but was also liable to blow up the program due to memory management issues. So I wrote the required algorithm, from scratch, in around an hour.

All this still doesn’t take account of the time and effort required for a new developer to familiarise themselves with several tens of thousands of lines of code, understand how it all fits together, find out which Linux libraries can and can’t work and learn how to use them, experiment and test, etc, etc.

All that without detracting the existing team from developing all the features Windows and Mac users keep crying out for.

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Photography is my hobby, and DXO on Windows works well for me - it’s not perfect, but I can live with the small issues which I encounter. I appreciate that for professionals each small issue has a much larger impact.

However, my ‘day job’ is working with Linux - I work for a large Linux vendor and spend most of my time ensuring that people using Linux (and other OpenSource tools like OpenStack, Ceph, Kubernetes etc) are able to use them successfully. I’m writing this response on a laptop running exclusively open source software.

I can’t comment on how much work it would take to port PhotoLab to Linux, but I think that the issue missed here is how to support a Linux version in the marketplace. Linux as a server OS is fantastic - and probably almost everything you interact with online is hosted or stored in a Linux based data-centre, but as a desktop OS there are huge practical issues. Not only the wide range of distributions and the different environments which they provide, but also the support for graphics cards and other hardware including tools like monitor calibration, printers etc.

I do love Linux - but it has it’s place in the corporate data-centre. Whatever issues you may have with Apple or Microsoft, things would not be likely to be better with a Linux version. All you would have is a different set of issues with perhaps even less accessibility to vendor support to resolve those problems.

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I did not expect a native Linux version of PhotoLab, and I don’t expect them ever to bother to make one.

I was extremely disappointed when it failed to install properly under WINE, given what WINE / Proton / Crossover will run nowadays, and given what failed was the .NET setup. Getting software to run under WINE isn’t difficult: it’s mostly a case of sticking to the official Windows APIs and not trying to be too clever. There’s also an easy way to test against it.

So it’s one of the very few reasons to keep a Windows PC around :frowning: and I wish it wasn’t.

Hi all, I just wanted to let you guys know that wine seems to have evolved enough to kind of manage this! I can run Photolab in linux! I’m still experimenting but in short, if

  1. Installing winehq-staging (version 5.2) and the 191224 winetricks
    
  2. Install .net 4.8 and d3dcompiler_47 using winetricks
    
  3. Change windows version to win10 (with winecfg)
    
  4. Run dxo photolab 3 installer (with wine64)
    
  5. Change windows version to win7 (with winecfg)
    
  6. Try to run photolab a few times (doesn’t seem to work at first) (with wine64)
    

…then I can run Photolab 3 under Linux!

So far I think it uses CPU only so it’s kind of slow but will try different direct x variants…dxvk seems to crash it for me, but will try variants of OS setting, net version and direct x drivers installed with winetricks.

I also managed to get DXO Optics Pro 11 to work in a similar way. Worth noting is that when using a “dirty” wineprefix where I had played around with different directx/dxvk didn’t work so use a clean new one.

Also the system and drivers might be a factor, I use kubuntu 19.10, have a nvidia 1070 with the 330 driver and an intel skylake CPU (6700k, yeah yeah I’ll upgrade with the next ryzen generation, last one was fine but no ssd vendors really used pcie4 to its full extent so waiting for the next one).

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Just to add my voice here.

It is true that Linux used to be the OS of geeks that would either use freeware, or write their own software. That is simply not true anymore, it is time that this meme is put to sleep. Regular users can now purchase machine where linux come pre-installed out-the-box, and many home users, as well as professional users, are going that way(sometime, like some of my family and friends, without even knowing it).

Linux users won’t pay for software? True in 2001, not true anymore. Get on with time please.

A lot of people, like myself, are dual booting their computer to take advantage of their favorite software. Once their favorite software is ported to Linux, most of those people will stop this dual booting nonsense and use Linux full time. For myself, if Photolab and Luminar became available on Linux, my Windows partition would be joyfully erased.

Linux on the desktop is growing, to the point where even Microsoft had to acknowledge that and give some form of Linux app support natively. Usually, when a product hit a particular market first, they establish dominance in that market. Now, Photolab could either establish dominance in that market, or do like they do on the other platforms and play second violin. Their choice, but it cannot be denied that an opportunity is there.

my 2¢

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Great post. Out of likes for now – my apologies.

If DxO could at least work with the Wine developers to get a PhotoLab version working well under Wine that would be a good short term resolution. In the long run, you are right. The only issue is that DxO is not in a position to be front-runners here. Heck DxO cannot even support macOS properly. PhotoLab 5 only supported the current OS and OS-1 for macOS which is by far worst in category OS support among serious photo editors and photo tools.

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I am with you here. Photo editing software is the only reason I use Windows. And before Bibble sold itself to Corel (it’s Aftershot Pro nowadays) I was happy to pay for photo software on Linux. Back then (2011) I could get just as good a result with Bibble Pro 5 as with Optics. Well, that could be because I was at an early stage of development with both products :rofl:

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currently Photolab 5 is running quite nice on wine. The Installer mist be closed because it is stuck before ending but the installation is still complete.
But there is one real Problem left you allways get an “unkown error " if you export a file.
I think the communication between the export process and the main program is not working.
I can send the Logfiles to a dxo developer. I think this Problem can be solved but without knowing what exactly dxo likes to do it is hard to find a fix.
Here is a Line from the logfile:
“”“DxO.PhotoLab - 360 - 18 | Processing - Info | Profiling DxO.PhotoLab.Processing.ProcessingService.ProcessItem : 84 057 ms with exception: Unable to open connection (DxO.PhotoLab.ProcessingCore.Core.Remote.ConnexionOpenException: Unable to open connection
at DxO.PhotoLab.Processing.ProcessingUnitPool.GetUnit(IProcessingItem itemToProcess, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
at DxO.PhotoLab.Processing.ProcessingService.ProcessItem(IWorkItem`1 workItem))””"

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