Google, Wine, & Codeweavers make Photoshop Run on Linux

Wine (which stands for Wine is not an emulator) is not really an application, rather Wine lets you run Windows applications on the Linux platform.

According to Underexposed, a survey by Novell identified Photoshop as the leading non-Linux application desired by Linux users:

"We hired CodeWeavers to make Photoshop CS and CS2 work better under Wine," Dan Kegel, of Google's software engineering team and the Wine 1.0 release manager, said on Google's open-source blog. "Photoshop is one of those applications that desktop Linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we're happy to say they work pretty well now...We look forward to further improvements in this area."

But given the advent of applications which make it easier to run more than one operating system on a given computer (e.g., Parallels, etc.), is Wine's focus the correct one?

Certainly, funding and interest from Google is a validator of sorts. It may be valid too that many Linux users simply don't want to have Windows running on their machines, no matter what set of games and applications they can access. Hence the popularity of projects like Wine which seek to give Windows functionality and software library without running Windows.