It's not "How to use Photoshop in Ubuntu", it's "How to use Photoshop in a VM"
How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#32Photoshop in a VM? is that not a horribly laggy experience? I have a Core2 Quad Q6600 based computer and when I have run Windows inside a VM it is too laggy to use as a serious desktop beyond using a few basic apps. Doing 1080p video is choppy too. Is there something about newer CPUs such as i7 that makes virtualisation hugely faster and more responsive?
I don't think Photoshop would be too laggy with modern hardware. I have some lag issues playing modern 3d games, but they seem to be related to game events that access the hard drive. I'm guessing this is because accessing compressed drives have some overhead.
With that said, I'd think the startup time would be horrendous unless he's just suspending the vm. The side effect of that is lots more HD storage requirements. So to make this as lag-free as possible, you would need to turn off hd compression, use suspend to avoid the windows bootup time and defrag like you would normally do in windows.
To answer your question, I believe modern Intel processors have virtualization optimizations built in.
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#33Photoshop in a VM? is that not a horribly laggy experience? I have a Core2 Quad Q6600 based computer and when I have run Windows inside a VM it is too laggy to use as a serious desktop beyond using a few basic apps. Doing 1080p video is choppy too. Is there something about newer CPUs such as i7 that makes virtualisation hugely faster and more responsive?
"Is there something about newer CPUs such as i7 that makes virtualisation hugely faster and more responsive?"
Well you probably could set the CPU affinity of every single application that is not the VM to one core and set the CPU affinity of the VM to the three other cores. A tiny script doing that should be fairly easy.
Maybe someone who knows VM better than me could tell if it would work or not?
Now my experience with VMs do not match yours: I've been running Windows just fine inside VM providing it has enough RAM (but RAM is basically given these days) and provided the special drivers were installed to make the UI fast.
Also, I've read professional photographer use Octocore Macs with 20 GB of RAM and create gigantic ramdisk for Photoshop and saying that it is incredibly much faster than letting the OS be "smart" about what/when to page to disk.
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#34Photoshop in a VM? is that not a horribly laggy experience? I have a Core2 Quad Q6600 based computer and when I have run Windows inside a VM it is too laggy to use as a serious desktop beyond using a few basic apps. Doing 1080p video is choppy too. Is there something about newer CPUs such as i7 that makes virtualisation hugely faster and more responsive?
I'd check your RAM settings first. A faster processor helps, but to virtualize an OS properly you need a good chunk of RAM to make both Host and Guest feel snappy. Four gigs works well for me without a VM running, but is a little laggy once a virtual OS is spun up. With my typical work load and 8 gigs of memory properly allocated between the host and guest OSes I rarely notice the VM running in the background.
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#35Photoshop in a VM? is that not a horribly laggy experience? I have a Core2 Quad Q6600 based computer and when I have run Windows inside a VM it is too laggy to use as a serious desktop beyond using a few basic apps. Doing 1080p video is choppy too. Is there something about newer CPUs such as i7 that makes virtualisation hugely faster and more responsive?
>> Is there something about newer CPUs such as i7 that makes virtualisation hugely faster and more responsive?
Yes.
http://ark.intel.com/Products/VirtualizationTechnology
Running the Android Emulator on my i7-3770k is smooth as silk with Intel Virtualization turned on. Without IV it's like rubbing my face on sandpaper.
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#36Photoshop in a VM? is that not a horribly laggy experience? I have a Core2 Quad Q6600 based computer and when I have run Windows inside a VM it is too laggy to use as a serious desktop beyond using a few basic apps. Doing 1080p video is choppy too. Is there something about newer CPUs such as i7 that makes virtualisation hugely faster and more responsive?
I'd check your RAM settings first. A faster processor helps, but to virtualize an OS properly you need a good chunk of RAM to make both Host and Guest feel snappy. Four gigs works well for me without a VM running, but is a little laggy once a virtual OS is spun up. With my typical work load and 8 gigs of memory properly allocated between the host and guest OSes I rarely notice the VM running in the background.
My host OS still feels fast enough with the VM running.
It's just stuff like menu draws and window dragging etc are very far from snappy. Throughput doesn't seem to be the issue so much as latency.
Possibly a graphics issue, though I do have a reasonable nvidia card and enabled 3d acceleration in Virtualbox.
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#37Thanks, muellerwolfram. This guide is excellent and dear to me as someone once stuck in the exact same position described in the opening paragraph. Indeed, flitting between operating systems was so natural that even now I instinctively want to take issue with your "dual boot sucks" but if I could use one OS for everything (and I do mean "everything", other OS emulation included) then I would, so quite simply: you are right.
For what it's worth, I chose a different route in solving my Photoshop dependence: I forced myself to learn alternatives. But I don't mean just that I learned GIMP (which I recommend, though completely sympathise with the "Regarding GIMP" section); I mean that I made it my goal to be someone who can take new software and ascertain how to do with it what I already know how to do in my "native" habitat, even if the method is convoluted or requires learning a new paradigm. This goes back to days of using elementary school computers with nothing more than MSPaint and enjoying that hit of satisfaction from performing a manual "crop": make a selection, copy it, minimise the canvas to a handful of pixels, ctrl+V, MSPaint automatically resizes the canvas to the pasted selection, BLAM it's a crop! (We've all been young, when figuring these things out for oneself is the next best thing to being a Jedi - and that said, if anyone has their own method for cropping in 2000-era MSPaint I'd love to hear it). Likewise in the "new paradigms" category, learning about Turing machines and formal data structures changed everything for me as a BASIC-minded programmer.
Since adopting this generalised view I have found it's helpful as a core principle: I can't always count on the environments I know, so learning to adapt is crucial. This applies to programming, competitions, and even romantic partners. In the infinite indulgence of our field to give everything a "cool" name, I refer to this as the "Peter Petrelli" skill.
Quite apart from arguing against using Photoshop in Ubuntu, it returns to your piece. Sometimes short of coding something up from scratch there really is only one program that does what we require to solve a specific problem, and sometimes the operating system is fixed. Knowing how to solve the equation for these variables is part of being an adaptable and valuable agent. Great article.
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#38Might as well just VirtualBox step and just install Windows instead of Ubuntu...
But what if for all the other applications, for example out of security and performance concerns and by desire of not having to reboot every patch-tuesday, he prefers to not run Windows?
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#39Is Photoshop really 100% stable on Windows or OS X? Still, very nice guide.
On the Mac you can run it constantly and it won't ever crash. It's one of the most amazingly reliable pieces of software out there.
Re: How to use Photoshop in a VM on Ubuntu
#40Photoshop in a VM? is that not a horribly laggy experience? I have a Core2 Quad Q6600 based computer and when I have run Windows inside a VM it is too laggy to use as a serious desktop beyond using a few basic apps. Doing 1080p video is choppy too. Is there something about newer CPUs such as i7 that makes virtualisation hugely faster and more responsive?
Do you have an SSD in the host system? As with many things when running outside of a VM, I've found that the SSD provides the greatest performance boost to most applications other than 3D gaming.
I've been doing web development work in a Windows VM for a number of years now and found it to be very responsive even on older MacBook Pros with with only one core of a Core2 Duo allocated to the VM. Adding more RAM helped a little bit, but the biggest speed boost was the addition of an SSD.