So I have a situation. I really want to switch to Linux as my main gaming/production OS but need the Adobe suite as I am a graphic designer. Adobe is the golden standard for this industry (and likely to always be) so while Gimp and Inkscape might work, they are not feasible for my career. I also know that there will be situations where games just don’t run well or at all on Linux.
Dualbooting works but is not really worth it for me as I would have to stop what I’m doing and restart my PC. I heard that you can set up a single GPU passthrough for games and software but it seems complicated. How difficult would that be to set up for a new user to Linux? I would consider myself a tech savvy person but I know very little about the ins and outs of Linux. I have a massive GPU (XFX RX 6900 XT) with a big support bracket that covers the second PCIE slot so buying another GPU isn’t really feasible either.
I do have an Unraid server with decent specs that I use for a hosting Minecraft servers and Jellyfin so setting up a VM on that might be a good option.
What would you guys recommend me to do?
If you depend on a piece of software for your career, you shouldn’t try to force it to work on another OS or some hardware it doesn’t have support for. Just run Windows.
You could try using a Windows VM, or even doing GPU passthrough. But do you really want to troubleshoot that for 2 days when an update breaks everything?
fwiw, running photoshop through a VM would be pretty easy and pretty quick to setup with very little (if any) troubleshooting required, and it’s unlikely that updates would break stuff. I’ve done it many, many times.
The real problem is getting good performance out of it. Now, I don’t know OP’s specific needs or what specific Adobe apps he’s using. if it’s just Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, he’s gonna be fine. if he’s got enough memory and he’s running the VM by itself, he shouldn’t notice much of any performance degradation until he’s got some gigantic files open in PS and/or he’s juggling a bunch of files between PS and Illustrator.
Now, if he’s trying to run AfterEffects or Premier, he could run into more serious performance issues and would definitely need to dual-boot if he wants to render anything. But he may not be using those apps.
Running those apps through Wine? THAT is the massive PitA that can take days to configure and troubleshoot and where an update can break anything— but it runs at native speed. Using a VM is pretty simple… just slower.
I mainly work with illustrator and Photoshop but I occasionally edit videos on Premier Pro.
Yeah, I heard Wine does not work well with Adobe products. I haven’t tried it though.
Wine will suck ass with Premier, if it works at all. There ARE reasonable alternatives to use in Linux, unlike with PS or Illustrator.
PS in Linux is… ok…. depending on what you’re doing with it. if it’s basic stuff, you’ll get by. start delving into big boy stuff, and it struggles. Illustrator… I doubt it. I’d stick with a VM for both for major workloads until you really need bare-metal performance. This is something you will have to feel out for yourself.
GPU passthrough is a huge headache that doesn’t work how you would want it to from what I’ve vented. You apparently need 2 gpus. There are some setups that take one in theory but I’ve yet to find anyone who properly set it up.
Those who I’ve found to have setup a GPU passthrough said it wasn’t worth the upkeep and stopped with the first update cycle.
I think this depends on the GPU and drivers, I know some professional/enterprise ones can be divided among multiple VMs and a host. I haven’t had to deal with this because it seems like a headache to try. And everything I use works on Linux anyway.