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.
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.
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.
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.
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 
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
Installing winehq-staging (version 5.2) and the 191224 winetricks
Install .net 4.8 and d3dcompiler_47 using winetricks
Change windows version to win10 (with winecfg)
Run dxo photolab 3 installer (with wine64)
Change windows version to win7 (with winecfg)
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).
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¢
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.
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 
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))””"
Despite your user name, DxO does not support Linux in any way, even via Wine. If you are not using an official Windows or Mac platform, you are not likely to get any help with such issues. DxO has more than enough work just supporting those official platforms.
My photography is the only reason why I use Windows. It would be great for Santa to bring a PL version for linux…I appreciate Santa may not exist. 
You misunderstood, I may support you to have a Photoshop 5 Version running under Linux / Wine.
All I need is a contact to an developer to discus what exactly is not working.
Than this may be fixed in Wine or maybe with a little patch/change on your site.
Even if you underestimated the number of Linux Users for your product. This is only a little afford for
you so why not just give it a try.
I do not work for DxO but, as an independent software developer, I can assure you that not many want to touch Linux because there are just too many different versions of Linux to try and support. DxO is a relatively small software house and have already got enough on their plate supporting the two mainstream OSes without having to allocate resources to something else.
I may be wrong here, but we’re talking about a port and not a complete rewrite. So, if a company like Cockos that produce Reaper can support all 3 platforms with 3 dev onboard, I would think that a single additional dev could handle it.
Might even benefit other platforms by finding and solving bugs who might have otherwise slipped through.
I just downloaded Reaper for Mac to see what it was like. My opinion is that it is truly awful!
It is apparently a “universal” UI, written possibly in Java, which neither looks nor feels like a true macOS app. Even the standard menus are not in the right place.
There is no way that you can compare such an app with the quality look and feel of PhotoLab, whose UI is truly native to Mac and Windows. This is why DxO could never “just” port PhotoLab to Linux - although there is a possibility that some of the core logic code could be reused, the complete UI would have to be written from scratch, which, I can fairly confidently say, is never going to happen.
Now, as others have said, if you want to work with Wine to solve the incompatibilities that it has, then go ahead, but don’t expect DxO to divert resources to such a niche platform with such a relatively small commercial market.
I uninstalled Reaper five minutes after starting it.
Well, you got me there, I’ve never used it on a Mac, I hate Mac Os, I don’t own a Mac computer and never will. On windows it is no better or worst than any other DAW I’ve ever used, on Linux it is about the same(but audio management is a complete mess, of course, Linux being Linux)but my understanding is that it was written for Windows and ported to Mac OS later on.
The problem with Linux as Black Magic Design have discovered with Resolve is that you have to do it for one of the 100’s of versions of Linux. In fact even there you have to download the specific version they develop on. If you use ANY other version of Linux you are on your own. There were bodges and scripts from users (unsupported by BMD) to get it to work on other Linux.
The Version the version of Linux BMD used had a 10 year guaranteed life. Someone took over control of that version and it now has a 2 year End of Life Warning (now at 12 months I believe.) This is true of any Linux in that it could go unsupported/obsolete at any time.
There is another problem… licencing. Some of the video codecs are not available on Linux due to licensing. So you may be able to put PhotoLab on to Linux but don’t expect it to be able to handle all the file formats it can on Windows or Mac.
There is a video that Linus Torvold did a few years ago discussing all this and explaining why, in his words: Linux is not suitable as a general desktop operating system. I will see if I Can find a link to it.
That’s exactly the point. Thank you for your input. I’m on the fence at least to try out an alternative workflow on an opensource/FOSS system but I’m afraid I won’t get that productivity I’m used to on Win / DxO and some other software.