I am not looking for software alternatives. Is the best method still to dual boot?

  • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    VMs won’t do for long, because you won’t have proper acceleration as it’s required by gfx apps like Lightroom. Sure, they’ll work, but you’ll experience slowdowns. You can run accelerated VMs, but I find them buggy.

    If you’re going to dual boot, you should install Linux on a separate DRIVE, not just a partition, and install the bootloader on that second drive. You force Linux to do that by disabling in the BIOS the Windows drive first, before installation. Then, you re-enable it again. Then you can choose what to boot at using F12 during boot time. If you put them on the same drive, Windows will eventually overwrite the bootloader.

    The ideal thing is to actually move to Darktable. https://mathiashueber.com/migrate-from-lightroom-to-open-source-alternative/

    • Cease@mander.xyz
      2·
      7 hours ago

      Single gpu passthrough vm works flawlessly if you can take the time to set it up

  • osbo9991@lemmy.world
    9·
    10 hours ago

    Dual boot sucks because Windows likes to overwrite partitions critical to booting Linux without warning.

    You could use Virtual Machine Manager (GUI frontend for QEMU/KVM, the most performant VM software on Linux). Here is a good guide on how to optimize the settings for a Windows 11 guest. I’ve used this guide to get SolidWorks, a CAD program, to work decent, so I assume other professional programs like Lightroom will run well too.

    • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
      3·
      7 hours ago

      separate drive with rEFInd as boot manager is fine. Windows will sometimes still alter the boot sequence to make it take priority, but that’s a relatively quick fix and doesn’t happen all that often.

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    21·
    7 hours ago

    Not.

    Now to be slightly more helpful (apologies for the provocation) I suggest you consider alternatives to Lightroom. I know that instantly you will receive countless comments on how alternatives are just nowhere near as good as Lightroom… and that’s OK. IMHO it’s OK because I bet YOUR usage of Lightroom isn’t the usage of others. So… I recommend you forget the brand “Adobe” or the product “Lightroom” and instead you list here the actual function of a tool you need.

    This way, by listing actual needs rather than a bundle product with branding and specific UX, you go back to the root of your problem, namely WHY do you need such a piece of software in the first place.

    Sure, you might end up with an entirely different workflow. Sure it will probably be absolutely alien at first… but so was learning how to use that piece of software in the first place too. Right now you do have the concepts, so replacing one click by a command line tool, or 1 piece of software by 10, is IMHO acceptable. What you will hopefully have in the end if YOUR workflow that is even more adapted compared to what you had first. It will be “weird” and maybe nobody else will get it but for you it will be exactly what you need.

    • rabber@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      11·
      11 hours ago

      Will performance still be comparable to native windows install?

      I was thinking about using windows as a docker container

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        2·
        8 hours ago

        We’re all running high performance games through the same thing all the time now. Benchmarks best Windows in most cases.

        You’ll be more than fine.

      • tty5@lemmy.world
        31·
        9 hours ago

        Docker containers share host os kernel - can’t be used to run a different os.

        Your options:

        • Run windows in a VM. You assign some of your PC resources (ram, CPU cores, storage) to vm. That windows VM is going to be within 1-2% of a PC with the specs matching resources assigned to VM. You won’t get GPU acceleration unless you pass the entire GPU to VM, but it doesn’t matter for Lightroom. Will run perfectly.
        • Run Lightroom with Wine. It runs as just another Linux program via a translation layer. It will get access to all resources your PC has and it won’t waste resources running entire 2nd os in a VM, but there is a performance impact of the translation layer. Performance impact varies depending on specific piece of software and sometimes it even runs faster.

        Edit: it turns out it does like GPU acceleration, so performance impact without GPU passthrough will be noticeable at least when opening images. Running it on wine is possible, but a pain - it requires manual workarounds and it doesn’t run perfectly even with them.