Running Photoshop/Illustrator

merthyr1831@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 11 points –

Is there any way to get these going relatively painlessly?

I've tried working with GPU-passthrough into a Windows VM which doesn't work all that well with my laptop setup (nvidia-AMD hybrid laptop).

Looking up other methods, seems like most of them rely on outdated versions of adobe software. I'd like to get something relatively new running

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Honestly probably not I still haven’t been able to get Lightroom 5 to install due to adobe’s jank

I'm 40 y/o, I used Photoshop & Illustrator since I was 8 years old. When I moved to Linux I tried everything, and ended up using Photopea.com and Inkscape.

Also... hello! My first post on Lemmy. Which is very cool all things considered. What Reddit should've been.

I used this Photoshop CC installer a couple months ago for v21.2.4 and it got Photoshop installed & running but I personally experienced a lot of bugginess with the UI.

Could be because I'm on Wayland, hadn't tried it on X11 myself. Seems like it worked decently for some other users.

Aside from that installer, though, modern Adobe products tend to be a huge pain to even get running. If Linux alternatives don't cut it for your use case then you might just have to dualboot Windows for those apps to have them fully usable unfortunately.

Are Linux friendly alternatives not an option? E.g. Gimp for Photoshop, Inkscape for Illustrator, etc.

GIMP's UI is really hard for new users as it is very unintuitive and the learning curve is steeper. Inkscape on the other hand is awesome.

Fair enough. Gimp's functionality is really impressive though.

It is indeed impressive, although nowhere near Photoshop sadly.

I agree completely with this. At my office, I’ve started installing Krita in place of photoshop for people who need to edit images. It has its own learning curve, but it’s been a wonderful alternative.

For basic stuff it is a great alternative with a better UI than GIMP, although when you start needing more advanced stuff anything else is better than Krita for photo manipulation.

I would completely agree with this. I think Krita is a pretty good middle-ground for people who don't need to do very intricate compositing.

Gimp is just... not great. It's ten years behind the times. These days I tend to use Krita, even though it's more geared towards digital painting than general image editing.

It's possible to get a relatively recent version of Adobe Photoshop, but it's very clunky due to WINE's arguably lackluster application support (most of the contributors focus on gaming). The alternatives can do the job though, GIMP (there's a Photoshop style to make it more familiar) and Inkscape are pretty decent and light alternatives.

<rant> Honestly, and I don't mean this to hate on either software as I used both a lot before I discovered piracy on Windows: the quality of GIMP and Inkscape is well below most competing FOSS projects, let alone their proprietary challengers.

GIMP is powerful, but might as well be declared abandoned with how they've been preparing to port it to GTK 3 for a decade. It has some great features being held back by poor hardware acceleration and falling behind features provided even by alternatives like Photopea. It's the X11 of photo editors.

Inkscape is okay, but the workflow stinks. BoxySVG is comparatively much more intuitive if it wasn't lacking in a bunch of features. Inkscape has also basically been abandoned imo, with the project still not managing to get Apple M1 support working on the latest MacOS for nearly a year.

The barrier to contribute to either project is also sky-high imo, with their insistence on using C for cross=platform, front end applications. Normally this wouldn't be a massive deal but it's one of the key reasons I think Photopea and other proprietary freeware apps are running circles on these two projects - The turnaround for features and UX is so much better with modern languages. </rant>

You can the same way you can technically run MS Office on Linux. You can manage to get it to start and run but using it for any form of productive use is probably gonna be rough.

Hmm. A couple years back someone shared some scripts for running the latest adobe/windows stuff but it didn't stay maintained for long :/