Someone Vibe-Coded Lightroom CC Into Running on Linux, and I am Not Touching It

Someone has managed to make Adobe Lightroom CC run on Linux via Wine. Don’t get it confused with the other Adobe offerings though; this is the cloud-syncing desktop version of Lightroom.

Sander Hilven, a developer, has put together a working recipe that works on Wine 11.8 staging with Lightroom CC 9.3.1. Interestingly, they have not done any of the actual work themselves.

The dev just told Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 what the goal was and left it to figure out the rest, while providing an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for the AI to work with.

The AI dug through crash logs and Wine compatibility issues autonomously, figuring out what needed fixing. It verified its own work by screenshotting the running Lightroom instance and clicking through the interface to confirm whether each fix held up.

Though, several fixes were needed to get things going. Some Windows APIs that Wine doesn’t implement were bringing down the entire Creative Cloud process on launch, some DLLs Lightroom depends on simply did not exist in Wine, and there were naming mismatches between how Lightroom looks for its files and how Adobe actually ships them.

The Remove/Heal tool was the trickiest fix. It kept crashing mid-use, and the AI traced it back to a dependency that Wine ships in the wrong place.

Currently, browsing, editing, exporting, and the Remove/Heal tool all work. Not everything is perfect though; tutorial videos don’t play, some GPU-accelerated effects may not render correctly, and there’s a bug with double-clicking thumbnails.

I won’t touch it

The sole human developer’s GitHub has no bio to speak of, and outside this repo, there is nothing that tells you much about who they are.

The entire project, including the patched DLLs and the assurance that they work, was produced by an AI agent. No human has looked at those binaries independently.

That is a lot of trust to put in AI-generated Windows DLL patches running inside your Linux computer.

I won’t be testing this due to all that and because I don’t have an Adobe subscription. But if you have one and have a spare machine lying around, why not give it a try and post your findings on our forum?

Yeah, that is a not-so-subtle nudge to visit it and interact with the other FOSSers. 😉