The options on Linux, honestly
- Wine or CrossOver. Older Photoshop releases can be made to run. Current Creative Cloud versions are hit and miss, and an update can undo an afternoon of setup.
- A Windows virtual machine. Reliable, at the cost of a licence, a chunk of memory and GPU passthrough if you want it to feel fast.
- GIMP and Krita. Excellent native applications with their own way of working and their own shortcuts. Photoshop features such as adjustment layers and layer styles don't always survive the trip through them.
- PSCraft. Photoshop's conventions and PSD read/write, in a browser.
Running it
Open the editor in a recent Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, Brave or Edge. There is no package to install and no Flatpak permission to grant.
Many Linux browser builds still ship with WebGPU switched off. PSCraft notices and uses WebGL2, so there is nothing to configure. If the canvas stays blank on an unusual driver, force the WebGL2 renderer.
Pen tablets work through the browser's pointer events, including pressure and tilt.
Open source underneath
The editor is PhotoCraft, written in Rust and released under the MIT and Apache-2.0 licences. You can read the code that touches your files.
If you'd prefer a native window, PhotoCraft's GitHub releases include an AppImage, .deb and .rpm packages and a Flatpak bundle. The desktop build adds system fonts and autosave, which the browser version lacks.
Where it fits beside GIMP and Krita
PSCraft isn't a reason to uninstall either of them. Krita remains the better painting tool, and GIMP's scripting has no equivalent here. PSCraft earns its bookmark when a Photoshop user sends you a PSD and expects one back.