I’m one of them, and currently looking into Linux, if I can migrate my Photoshop tools/brushes/gradients/etc successfully over to another program that is compatible.
My only hang up after that is gaming, and I feel that can be resolved with dual boot to win10.
It’s also on Arch via the AUR, source is on github, has build instructions, they seem to be oriented around Debian based OS’s, but you could probably/maybe figure it out for other OS’s as well?
Games can be made to work with some tinkering, but not every game has a build supporting Linux and that can be daunting to people who don’t use Linux as their main daily driver.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for ten years now, and it has gotten to the point where you get a game on Steam, press Play and it runs, unless it requires rootkit malware, and even some of those work.
Steam does have an option to support otherwise unsupported games on linux, its the result of part of their SteamOS and Steamdeck development, but even they advertise which games are and are not compatible.
Proton, while spearheaded and massively contributed to by Valve, is totally open source, any linux user can use it anyway they want to, and there are others like GloriousEggroll, with his own significant tweaks and optimizations, there’s a whole dedicated branch specifically for running Titanfall 2…
The only games that are not compatible either are so by choice of intentionally refusing to make their anti cheat work on linux, or they are brand spanking new and use some newfangled DX12/Nvidia specific thing, which then has to be reverse emgineered so that it works with Proton.
On average, that happens in 3 to 6 months after the game is released.
You are completely wrong, it can be made to work on nearly any modern distro.
Like, the only one that even comes to mind where it would probably have problems, would be like the muscl variant of Void linux, because… its based on an entirely different C/C++ library.
You would genuinely be hard pressed to find a linux distro that came out in the last 5 years that would have problems with Proton, I legitimately have no idea why you think its only officially supported on Ubuntu, I am baffled as to how you can be this misinformed.
A Steam Deck, for example, is … impossible without Proton.
The Steak Deck native OS is SteamOS, which is Arch-based.
PopOS! is a pretty decent, arguably superior, Ubuntu alternative… Debian-based, runs Proton just fine.
Bazzite, an alternate OS for Steam Decks and also just a decent general use anywhere distro… Fedora based, runs Proton just fine.
And, beyond that, Steam can easily run on each of those OS’s, and basically their entire sort of family lineage that derives from their basal OS, including said base OS.
Can you tell me how/why you came to think Proton only works properly on Ubuntu?
I am genuienly curious as to how you came to be so misinformed.
my god linux and intel graphics drivers were so easy for me to setup. Even got HDR running first attempt which is apparently hard. No idea why, may have just been the distro made it easy.
I figure that at least a few games I like to play are not compatible with Linux. I haven’t yet gotten the full list of games that won’t run on it but I’d hedge a bet that there’s more than one. One of them which I play a lot, Warframe, is apparently a bit buggy on it. I’m a sucker for multiplayer games and if there is kernel level anti cheat on them it might cause things to break.
Gaming on Linux is superior, on a lot of games!
I dual booted and ran benchmarks on Windows 11 and Fedora, same hardware. Ran nothing but the OS and Steam in the background, (gaming mode on and off), oddly found better performance with gaming mode off, then tried the same thing with Fedora. 5-10% higher framerates in Fedora running Proton.
Tried the same thing with synched Firefox tabs, half a dozen open tabs, telegram and discord running.
Fedora sometimes hit 15% higher framerates.
I’ve been gaming almost exclusively in Linux since roughly start of COVID. It’s come a long way. I am this close to VR on Fedora, but it’s still not quite working.
For me, the most noticeable gain was in Monster Hunter World, but it was what I ran the tests on. I also played a lot of Earth Defense Force 5 and Genshin Impact.
GI was always finnicky to get running. MHW did take longer to launch, and the new Monster Hunter Wild takes obnoxiously long to launch on first run after an update.
The only problem is some anticheats and older games. Whenever the boys and I wanna play Battlefield I gotta switch to Windows, but besides that it’s basically fine.
Nah, I’ve been trying to get the Sims 2 ultimate collection to run on mint for a while now, to no avail. I know it’s possible, but all the necessary links etc. have died, and the internet archive hasn’t been helpful yet. Once the people making running older games possible stop doing it, it just… becomes impossible, unless you can make those things yourself.
To an extent, yes. The oldest Windows game that I’d still probably want to play legitimately is probably Thief: The Dark Project, from 1998. It was made for DirectX version 6. Naturally, it will just not run on modern systems, Windows or Linux.
There are patches that bring it to DX9. It has an internal frame rate limiter to something weird, 90 fps or something. The weakest machine I have available can push that about at 4K while apparently still in full energy saving mode.
Proton’s DX9 emulation is apparently a bit rough, but most of the DX9 games you’d want to emulate are just fine with ‘brute force’. There’s a couple of problematic games - CS:GO, for instance - where the efficiency matters.
While going for another program, ideally non proprietary, with a native Linux version would be ideal, I would not be surprised if running Photoshop on Linux with wine was a viable option these days. Or will be in a not-too-distant future.
As for games, what the others have said. Unless you’re into a specific multiplier game with a kernel level “anticheat”, then it should be fine.
In fact, I suspect Photoshop, rather than gaming, is much more likely to be the reason you’d have to dual boot.
Don’t know if this is particularly relevant as a comparison to your Photoshop idea, but I have successfully run things like windows version of Cascadeur and Blender through Proton; in the case of Blender, it was for running an older Kenshi modding import export plugin, which only supports the Windows version of Blender.
Literally just set it up through Steam, Proton Experimental.
UI scaling / fonts can be a bit wonky, but for just doing the import/export steps, its totally workable, as… a .blend file is a .blend file, so you can do the other edits in a linux version of Blender.
Or, I could probably use ProtonTricks to add some fonts and font subpixel AA dependencies to get it to work ‘more right’, I remember that being what I ended up doing back when I was still using MO2.
Or, or, you could try Bottles, that would probably be a more sane way to try and set up a more… fully featured, editor type of Windows program, within Linux, it tends to handle those kinds of esoteric dependencies a bit better, has more of them as just part of the default preset.
Holy shit, doing all that for an old Kenshi plugin is just fantastic, you genuinely got a laugh out of me. I did think people who played Kenshi seemed like masochists (or very zen and meditative people) but thanks for the confirmation.
I initially thought something like that, but another comment mentions a bunch of potential Adobe cloud + DRM bullshit that may or may not make the wine/proton approach range from impossible to quite a bit broken.
I would not describe setting that up as masochistic, it was actually quite easy, easier than figuring out how to install Windows on the hardware I have, without blowing up everything else.
Dual booting linux and windows?
That’s masochism.
… I actually was a karateka for a decade +, so, perhaps i am some combination of meditative and masochistic, by some people’s standards.
I very much appreciate the extent to which Kenshi is not a power fantasy, the extent to which … it allows you to become OP as fuck and do many incredible things… but you have to actually earn it.
Anyway, yes, the DRM is probably your main problem there with Adobe, … I dunno, find a crack or use Krita or Gimp or other alternatives?
At least personally, I find that those two do everything I need, there are basically only super niche scenarios where linux does not have an at least comparably featured alternative to some windows software.
I recently got a local LLM spun up… on my Steam Deck. Running Bazzite.
Literally so easy I did it without a mouse or keyboard.
Ah it seems you have me confused, I’m not the guy who needs Photoshop.
Interestingly, I have been dual booting Linux and windows for a while in the past. That was way, way back though, around 2010 I’d say. Back then, gaming on Linux was still very much hit and miss (but mostly miss, for me) and I had nothing better to do than gaming after uni so I did not have much of a choice.
I’ll say, maybe it was dumb luck, more likely it’s Windows getting shitter, but dual booting used to be much less of a faff from what I can gather. For instance I never had a windows update torch my boot record to force itself instead of grubby grub. I understand that can be a common occurrence these days.
After that and getting a real job TM, I had much less time for it so I wiped that sad excuse for an OS from my system with a grin and never looked back. Which also means, there’s been a decent chunk of time I only did with whatever was available in Linux as I could not be bothered with wine. So I don’t know how easy things have become, my only exposure is now the odd bit of gaming again but, as you know, Steam just makes it work for me.
+1 for Krita, I don’t need much but it more than fits the bill for me. There are other threads in there though that do mention some stuff is just a lot harder when compared to PS for peeps who are actually good at the stuff.
LLMs (ok ok,not local) now come by default on Windows, without keyboard or mouse, just the mandatory connection to the mothership. So, yay windows?
I would not be surprised if running Photoshop on Linux with wine was a viable option these days. Or will be in a not-too-distant future.
Thats basically what I was trying to respond to initially.
I’m use lemmy on mobile, and sometimes the sort of thread branches become a confusing rainbow of … wait who am I talking to?
But anyway yeah, I used to be able to dual boot linux and windows fairly easily, but then, MSFT decided that their idea of Secure Boot involves rewriting your GRUB or whatever, and breaking your bootloader / boot sector.
And it would do this via Windows updates.
So thats a rootkit, as far as I’m concerned, fuck em, get off my PC.
IRT local LLMs, that aren’t spyware, that are containerized, that don’t burn down an acre of forest for every 15 minutes their datacenter runs?
Alpaca. Its a flatpak, makes setting up a local LLM about as easy at it could possibly be.
IRT to Kenshi…
Seek not the “wisdom” of Okran, for he is a false god, a cruel god, his “Holy Nation” is an abominable pox, a viscious hypocrisy manifest in blood stained sand and broken souls.
Instead, seek the meek, foster them, and your rewards shall be numerous and unexpected.
… ahem …
Uh yeah Kenshi has as almost much lore and worldbuilding as something like a Bethesda game, but it does have a very unorthodox sort of control scheme.
Its… kind of like playing on old school, SWG/MxO era MMO, but its… singleplayer, and … basically a simulation of a world, more so than a ‘game’ with a coherent main plot.
You just have to go find the plotlines, the people with backstories, the factions with conflicts.
You can be a fighter, a thief, a caravaneer, you can build a town, you can raise an army, and lead them all into battle.
Its unorthodox, if you need a game to handhold you and direct you, you probably won’t like Kenshi.
But if you want a confusing and brutal world that is entirely capable of existing and functioning without you… you might like it.
Ah I did say that, but as an answer to the post above who wondered whether a dual boot would be needed for PS.
So what I heard is true. Yep, shitty practice from MS. In other news, water makes you wet.
No no obviously windows would not support that. It provides some value, and respects the user.
You do make it sound good, I just think I am sadly no longer at a point in my life where I can reasonably dedicate the chunk of time that would be needed to get into it. Maybe I’ll change my mind. Thank you for the enthusiastic write up!
In my understanding, still no, especially not the more advanced filters stuff. PS6 (or whatever the last one you could actually buy was) on the other hand is 95+% functional if you can go back. Not an expert, GIMP is fine for my needs, there’s even a spin with PS-like menu layout if that’s your jam, but happy to be told I’m wrong about new PS.
Adobe shit and AutoCAD stuff are the the last major sticking points these days, Office is in the cloud now. Shame these last two won’t let their cash cows be rented in the cloud (instead of subscribed, you know, a long term rental agreement using your own computer) to my knowledge. There’s always VMs.
Ah, that’s good to know. I wonder why that is.
I don’t use these programs beyond the odd very simple image manipulation that could be done just as easily in paint, so I have no idea what people want from Photoshop alternative. However, I seem to keep hearing no single open source program does everything from people who are PS power users.
Don’t get me started on AutoCAD, and just CAD tools in general… Being more involved on that side, from a dev rather than user perspective, I can’t say I think very highly of Autodesk, or the idea of having all these geometry kernels be proprietary, and Autodesk acquiring as many of them as it can. Maths is public, maths research belongs to the public, you can fuck off with gating it.
As for VMs, we are talking about apps that need a relatively good GPU and therefore one would need to do some GPU pass through on their VM to use it properly I believe. Assuming I’m right, that may be more trouble than it’s worth compared to a dual boot (also assuming this hasn’t gotten much simpler than my somewhat distant memory now)
Modern versions of Photoshop are deeply integrated with another software called Adobe Cloud. As in, you can’t even install Photoshop by itself, it needs to be installed and managed via Adobe cloud, which has to constantly be running in the background for Photoshop to work (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s some kernel level BS, knowing Adobe). They are also reliant on other Adobe online services for some tools and services, and not just the generative AI ones.
That’s usually what causes a lot of hangups I believe. For example, if you need to connect your Photoshop to your client’s Adobe cloud or share files through it, or maybe connect Photoshop to other Adobe products like Indesign or After Effects, that may not work properly. This even applies to pirated versions of Photoshops on windows, where a lot of the patching comes from blocking Adobe’s constant interference with the program as it’s running, but as a result several tools may end up not working.
As for stuff people want from Photoshop, this is anecdotal from me but I primary use Photoshop to letter things and literally no other program that runs on Linux even comes close to the simplicity and versatility Photoshop gives me for lettering with its type tool. It is just so simple to configure text the way I want to and there are so many ways to modify it. Clip Studio Paint is the second best contender (makes sense since it used to be primarily a comic creation software) but, shocker, it doesn’t run on Linux either.
Every open source tool I tried, Gimp and Krita included, is so many miles behind in this department that I thought I had returned to the stone age when I tried using them for this purpose earlier this year. Krita didn’t even have a live preview of the text I was writing. It was completely unusable for my more advanced needs.
This is why I just tell people who use Photoshop and Adobe that want to switch to Linux to just accept dual booting. It’s realistically the only thing that won’t constantly lead to headaches with the software.
I have to use illustrator for work sometimes. I used to dual boot, now I use winboat. It’s a bit of a pain to set up initially but it works well once you’ve done that
Thank you so much for the detailed answer. I was not aware of that level of BS on the Photoshop front, though that does not surprise me. I guess I’m showing my age a bit by remembering Photoshop to just be a standalone program without any of that “not that long ago”.
Games work better on Linux than you might expect. Check out protondb for specific titles you’re thinking of. Most things I’ve just hit “play” on steam or heroic and they work n
You might be surprised by how capable linux gaming has gotten. The only thing really missing is AAA FPS type games. That doesn’t matter at all to me, but its something to consider. Just about everything else plays right out of the box.
I know it isn’t an exact solution, but people have created a Photoshop-like UI layout and keybindings for Gimp. That could help, should you choose to go with Gimp as the image editor.
I’ve dual booted my gaming rig with Windows 11 and Linux. The only thing I use windows for is Turtle WoW. If that would work on linux, I’d have no reason to have windows. I had it working on macOS, but it stopped working at macOS 26. and the emulation tool that i was utilising isn’t being updated anymore. so it’s unlikely going to work again. If Linux would run my Turtle WoW, I’d be 100% linux on my gaming rig. All my other games work out of the box. Anyway. Linux is the shit! I
I’m still using Windows 11 just from inertia, but I’ve been putting my kids on Linux Mint and Bazzite depending.
I don’t think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer, but I won’t likely have more than the one Windows laptop at this point. My entire home lab and home infra is Linux of one variety or another. If we count VMs, then I overwhelmingly using Debian.
I don’t think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer
Because you have to use VS Code instead of VS? You can always deploy to a Windows VM if you need to be sure IIS works. Though everything will just run on dotnet and nginx through a reverse proxy if you want to stay within Linux.
For most cases you can use Rider, which has a native Linux version. It doesn’t do database projects so if you use MSSQL without an OEM ORM you’re gonna want at least VS Code, but other than that it works fine.
Of course if you’re a .NET developer in a corporate environment you probably don’t have a choice as you’re already using a Windows VM through Azure Virtual Desktop just so that your company can chain itself harder to daddy Microsoft.
I’ve started working with affinity and I’m pretty impressed so far. It does have some hiccups importing Photoshop brushes where the brush settings are wiped but I figure I have to look further into that to see if that can be remedied.
I have heard that running Photoshop in Winboat works. Winboat is a Windows container where you can install a whole windows system in to it. I ma not sure if it works with the latest Photoshop but I would assume it does.
While I don’t generally recommend it, NVDIA has streaming options for games on Windows. You can even run this from a browser if you wanted, all within Linux. I would be surprised if you couldn’t use this for Photoshop or an alternative existed.
It’s just important to keep in mind this isn’t your computer, its a subscription to someone else’s computer. I just thought I’d mention this because it’s not commonly suggested and it’s nice to know avaliable options.
You can also just get a separate computer with MacOS for Photoshop and ditch the kernal games or maybe play them on Mac if they’re low end, and use Linux for everything else.
Maybe rootkits will be gone soon. 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop.
I’m one of them, and currently looking into Linux, if I can migrate my Photoshop tools/brushes/gradients/etc successfully over to another program that is compatible.
My only hang up after that is gaming, and I feel that can be resolved with dual boot to win10.
Gaming on Linux either works on Linux or the game requires a rootkit malware to run.
I refuse to call it “kernel-level anti-cheat.” That’s like calling a sucking chest wound “alternative breathing”
Eh could do with a Linux version of MO2 or Vortex. Manual modding is tedious and plenty of mods use the mod managers for settings.
It exists and is called Limo.
https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.limo_app.limo
It’s basically linux native MO2.
I’ve been using it for New Vegas, and Cyberpunk 77, for almost two years now.
Works pretty good!
Don’t have to do some kind of wacky wine/proton set up for each instance of MO2.
EDIT:
If you prefer non flatpak, though the flatpak is the officially supported version, you can do a other kinds of installs:
https://github.com/limo-app/limo
It’s also on Arch via the AUR, source is on github, has build instructions, they seem to be oriented around Debian based OS’s, but you could probably/maybe figure it out for other OS’s as well?
When I first swapped the linux I was able to get MO2 working with Wine. Had a Wabbajack mod list running. It was a bit of a pain, though.
Games can be made to work with some tinkering, but not every game has a build supporting Linux and that can be daunting to people who don’t use Linux as their main daily driver.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for ten years now, and it has gotten to the point where you get a game on Steam, press Play and it runs, unless it requires rootkit malware, and even some of those work.
Steam does have an option to support otherwise unsupported games on linux, its the result of part of their SteamOS and Steamdeck development, but even they advertise which games are and are not compatible.
You’re talking about Proton.
Proton, while spearheaded and massively contributed to by Valve, is totally open source, any linux user can use it anyway they want to, and there are others like GloriousEggroll, with his own significant tweaks and optimizations, there’s a whole dedicated branch specifically for running Titanfall 2…
The only games that are not compatible either are so by choice of intentionally refusing to make their anti cheat work on linux, or they are brand spanking new and use some newfangled DX12/Nvidia specific thing, which then has to be reverse emgineered so that it works with Proton.
On average, that happens in 3 to 6 months after the game is released.
Proton is also not configured to run well on every Linux distro, only officially supports some Ubuntu versions.
And runs even better on Arch thanks to CachyOS.
You are completely wrong, it can be made to work on nearly any modern distro.
Like, the only one that even comes to mind where it would probably have problems, would be like the muscl variant of Void linux, because… its based on an entirely different C/C++ library.
You would genuinely be hard pressed to find a linux distro that came out in the last 5 years that would have problems with Proton, I legitimately have no idea why you think its only officially supported on Ubuntu, I am baffled as to how you can be this misinformed.
A Steam Deck, for example, is … impossible without Proton.
The Steak Deck native OS is SteamOS, which is Arch-based.
PopOS! is a pretty decent, arguably superior, Ubuntu alternative… Debian-based, runs Proton just fine.
Bazzite, an alternate OS for Steam Decks and also just a decent general use anywhere distro… Fedora based, runs Proton just fine.
And, beyond that, Steam can easily run on each of those OS’s, and basically their entire sort of family lineage that derives from their basal OS, including said base OS.
Can you tell me how/why you came to think Proton only works properly on Ubuntu?
I am genuienly curious as to how you came to be so misinformed.
You’re arguing against Steam themselves on this one
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Requirements
In my experience the linux native bulids run worse than the windows + proton on linux.
Why not just play games on linux?
It works so well nowadays
Does it now? I have an Arc B580 and Linux drivers are lackluster at best.
my god linux and intel graphics drivers were so easy for me to setup. Even got HDR running first attempt which is apparently hard. No idea why, may have just been the distro made it easy.
Pretty sure everyone warned that Intel drivers would be iffy regardless of OS and to only buy if you’re okay being a beta tester for Intel.
The linux AMD GPU driver is superior to their windows driver
Except they’re fine on Windows and have been since I got it. But yeah it’s definitely a dealbreaker for moving to Linux, I’m not buying new hardware
I figure that at least a few games I like to play are not compatible with Linux. I haven’t yet gotten the full list of games that won’t run on it but I’d hedge a bet that there’s more than one. One of them which I play a lot, Warframe, is apparently a bit buggy on it. I’m a sucker for multiplayer games and if there is kernel level anti cheat on them it might cause things to break.
Check them here: https://www.protondb.com/
Proton has a constantly updating list of games and how well they work on Linux and the Steam Deck
Man, none of the games I am trying to get running are on there. Bummer.
Thanks for the link! Saving this so I can check it out later.
Gaming on Linux works now. I play every game I care for.
Gaming on Linux is superior, on a lot of games! I dual booted and ran benchmarks on Windows 11 and Fedora, same hardware. Ran nothing but the OS and Steam in the background, (gaming mode on and off), oddly found better performance with gaming mode off, then tried the same thing with Fedora. 5-10% higher framerates in Fedora running Proton.
Tried the same thing with synched Firefox tabs, half a dozen open tabs, telegram and discord running. Fedora sometimes hit 15% higher framerates.
Yeah I’ve been playing Elden Ring with no crashes since switching to Mint.
Are you on an AMD card?
I have a Ryzen CPU with onboard graphics and then an Nvidia 3060ti mobile. Rpmfusion drivers in Linux and Nvidia experience in Windows.
Interesting!
Theoretically, that (Nvidia graphics + IGP display out) is the worst case scenario for Linux.
I used to get worse performance on my 3090, but it’s been awhile. I will have to try again.
I’ve been gaming almost exclusively in Linux since roughly start of COVID. It’s come a long way. I am this close to VR on Fedora, but it’s still not quite working.
Out of curiosity, what games do you see any gains in, and at approximately what settings?
And if I come across as skeptical, that’s not my intent at all. I’m interested!
For me, the most noticeable gain was in Monster Hunter World, but it was what I ran the tests on. I also played a lot of Earth Defense Force 5 and Genshin Impact. GI was always finnicky to get running. MHW did take longer to launch, and the new Monster Hunter Wild takes obnoxiously long to launch on first run after an update.
I have a 3080ti and it runs better on popos/cachyos vs windows 10. Never tried windows 11 on it though.
The only problem is some anticheats and older games. Whenever the boys and I wanna play Battlefield I gotta switch to Windows, but besides that it’s basically fine.
A lot of older games run better on Linux. Lots of older games that don’t even work on Windows anymore
Huh. I would have thought that older games would run better than newer ones.
Nah, I’ve been trying to get the Sims 2 ultimate collection to run on mint for a while now, to no avail. I know it’s possible, but all the necessary links etc. have died, and the internet archive hasn’t been helpful yet. Once the people making running older games possible stop doing it, it just… becomes impossible, unless you can make those things yourself.
To an extent, yes. The oldest Windows game that I’d still probably want to play legitimately is probably Thief: The Dark Project, from 1998. It was made for DirectX version 6. Naturally, it will just not run on modern systems, Windows or Linux.
There are patches that bring it to DX9. It has an internal frame rate limiter to something weird, 90 fps or something. The weakest machine I have available can push that about at 4K while apparently still in full energy saving mode.
Proton’s DX9 emulation is apparently a bit rough, but most of the DX9 games you’d want to emulate are just fine with ‘brute force’. There’s a couple of problematic games - CS:GO, for instance - where the efficiency matters.
While going for another program, ideally non proprietary, with a native Linux version would be ideal, I would not be surprised if running Photoshop on Linux with wine was a viable option these days. Or will be in a not-too-distant future.
As for games, what the others have said. Unless you’re into a specific multiplier game with a kernel level “anticheat”, then it should be fine.
In fact, I suspect Photoshop, rather than gaming, is much more likely to be the reason you’d have to dual boot.
Don’t know if this is particularly relevant as a comparison to your Photoshop idea, but I have successfully run things like windows version of Cascadeur and Blender through Proton; in the case of Blender, it was for running an older Kenshi modding import export plugin, which only supports the Windows version of Blender.
Literally just set it up through Steam, Proton Experimental.
UI scaling / fonts can be a bit wonky, but for just doing the import/export steps, its totally workable, as… a .blend file is a .blend file, so you can do the other edits in a linux version of Blender.
Or, I could probably use ProtonTricks to add some fonts and font subpixel AA dependencies to get it to work ‘more right’, I remember that being what I ended up doing back when I was still using MO2.
Or, or, you could try Bottles, that would probably be a more sane way to try and set up a more… fully featured, editor type of Windows program, within Linux, it tends to handle those kinds of esoteric dependencies a bit better, has more of them as just part of the default preset.
Holy shit, doing all that for an old Kenshi plugin is just fantastic, you genuinely got a laugh out of me. I did think people who played Kenshi seemed like masochists (or very zen and meditative people) but thanks for the confirmation.
I initially thought something like that, but another comment mentions a bunch of potential Adobe cloud + DRM bullshit that may or may not make the wine/proton approach range from impossible to quite a bit broken.
TL;DR Adobe is probably evil incarnate.
I would not describe setting that up as masochistic, it was actually quite easy, easier than figuring out how to install Windows on the hardware I have, without blowing up everything else.
Dual booting linux and windows?
That’s masochism.
… I actually was a karateka for a decade +, so, perhaps i am some combination of meditative and masochistic, by some people’s standards.
I very much appreciate the extent to which Kenshi is not a power fantasy, the extent to which … it allows you to become OP as fuck and do many incredible things… but you have to actually earn it.
Anyway, yes, the DRM is probably your main problem there with Adobe, … I dunno, find a crack or use Krita or Gimp or other alternatives?
At least personally, I find that those two do everything I need, there are basically only super niche scenarios where linux does not have an at least comparably featured alternative to some windows software.
I recently got a local LLM spun up… on my Steam Deck. Running Bazzite.
Literally so easy I did it without a mouse or keyboard.
… Can you do that on Windows?
heheheheh
Ah it seems you have me confused, I’m not the guy who needs Photoshop.
Interestingly, I have been dual booting Linux and windows for a while in the past. That was way, way back though, around 2010 I’d say. Back then, gaming on Linux was still very much hit and miss (but mostly miss, for me) and I had nothing better to do than gaming after uni so I did not have much of a choice.
I’ll say, maybe it was dumb luck, more likely it’s Windows getting shitter, but dual booting used to be much less of a faff from what I can gather. For instance I never had a windows update torch my boot record to force itself instead of grubby grub. I understand that can be a common occurrence these days.
After that and getting a real job TM, I had much less time for it so I wiped that sad excuse for an OS from my system with a grin and never looked back. Which also means, there’s been a decent chunk of time I only did with whatever was available in Linux as I could not be bothered with wine. So I don’t know how easy things have become, my only exposure is now the odd bit of gaming again but, as you know, Steam just makes it work for me.
+1 for Krita, I don’t need much but it more than fits the bill for me. There are other threads in there though that do mention some stuff is just a lot harder when compared to PS for peeps who are actually good at the stuff.
LLMs (ok ok,not local) now come by default on Windows, without keyboard or mouse, just the mandatory connection to the mothership. So, yay windows?
maybe I should try Kenshi sometime…
Oh.
Perhaps I am confused, though you did say:
Thats basically what I was trying to respond to initially.
I’m use lemmy on mobile, and sometimes the sort of thread branches become a confusing rainbow of … wait who am I talking to?
But anyway yeah, I used to be able to dual boot linux and windows fairly easily, but then, MSFT decided that their idea of Secure Boot involves rewriting your GRUB or whatever, and breaking your bootloader / boot sector.
And it would do this via Windows updates.
So thats a rootkit, as far as I’m concerned, fuck em, get off my PC.
IRT local LLMs, that aren’t spyware, that are containerized, that don’t burn down an acre of forest for every 15 minutes their datacenter runs?
Alpaca. Its a flatpak, makes setting up a local LLM about as easy at it could possibly be.
IRT to Kenshi…
Seek not the “wisdom” of Okran, for he is a false god, a cruel god, his “Holy Nation” is an abominable pox, a viscious hypocrisy manifest in blood stained sand and broken souls.
Instead, seek the meek, foster them, and your rewards shall be numerous and unexpected.
… ahem …
Uh yeah Kenshi has as almost much lore and worldbuilding as something like a Bethesda game, but it does have a very unorthodox sort of control scheme.
Its… kind of like playing on old school, SWG/MxO era MMO, but its… singleplayer, and … basically a simulation of a world, more so than a ‘game’ with a coherent main plot.
You just have to go find the plotlines, the people with backstories, the factions with conflicts.
You can be a fighter, a thief, a caravaneer, you can build a town, you can raise an army, and lead them all into battle.
Its unorthodox, if you need a game to handhold you and direct you, you probably won’t like Kenshi.
But if you want a confusing and brutal world that is entirely capable of existing and functioning without you… you might like it.
Ah I did say that, but as an answer to the post above who wondered whether a dual boot would be needed for PS.
So what I heard is true. Yep, shitty practice from MS. In other news, water makes you wet.
No no obviously windows would not support that. It provides some value, and respects the user.
You do make it sound good, I just think I am sadly no longer at a point in my life where I can reasonably dedicate the chunk of time that would be needed to get into it. Maybe I’ll change my mind. Thank you for the enthusiastic write up!
Ah hey that’s totally fair!
May you walk with purpose, but your steps be gentle.
In my understanding, still no, especially not the more advanced filters stuff. PS6 (or whatever the last one you could actually buy was) on the other hand is 95+% functional if you can go back. Not an expert, GIMP is fine for my needs, there’s even a spin with PS-like menu layout if that’s your jam, but happy to be told I’m wrong about new PS.
Adobe shit and AutoCAD stuff are the the last major sticking points these days, Office is in the cloud now. Shame these last two won’t let their cash cows be rented in the cloud (instead of subscribed, you know, a long term rental agreement using your own computer) to my knowledge. There’s always VMs.
Ah, that’s good to know. I wonder why that is. I don’t use these programs beyond the odd very simple image manipulation that could be done just as easily in paint, so I have no idea what people want from Photoshop alternative. However, I seem to keep hearing no single open source program does everything from people who are PS power users.
Don’t get me started on AutoCAD, and just CAD tools in general… Being more involved on that side, from a dev rather than user perspective, I can’t say I think very highly of Autodesk, or the idea of having all these geometry kernels be proprietary, and Autodesk acquiring as many of them as it can. Maths is public, maths research belongs to the public, you can fuck off with gating it.
As for VMs, we are talking about apps that need a relatively good GPU and therefore one would need to do some GPU pass through on their VM to use it properly I believe. Assuming I’m right, that may be more trouble than it’s worth compared to a dual boot (also assuming this hasn’t gotten much simpler than my somewhat distant memory now)
Modern versions of Photoshop are deeply integrated with another software called Adobe Cloud. As in, you can’t even install Photoshop by itself, it needs to be installed and managed via Adobe cloud, which has to constantly be running in the background for Photoshop to work (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s some kernel level BS, knowing Adobe). They are also reliant on other Adobe online services for some tools and services, and not just the generative AI ones.
That’s usually what causes a lot of hangups I believe. For example, if you need to connect your Photoshop to your client’s Adobe cloud or share files through it, or maybe connect Photoshop to other Adobe products like Indesign or After Effects, that may not work properly. This even applies to pirated versions of Photoshops on windows, where a lot of the patching comes from blocking Adobe’s constant interference with the program as it’s running, but as a result several tools may end up not working.
As for stuff people want from Photoshop, this is anecdotal from me but I primary use Photoshop to letter things and literally no other program that runs on Linux even comes close to the simplicity and versatility Photoshop gives me for lettering with its type tool. It is just so simple to configure text the way I want to and there are so many ways to modify it. Clip Studio Paint is the second best contender (makes sense since it used to be primarily a comic creation software) but, shocker, it doesn’t run on Linux either.
Every open source tool I tried, Gimp and Krita included, is so many miles behind in this department that I thought I had returned to the stone age when I tried using them for this purpose earlier this year. Krita didn’t even have a live preview of the text I was writing. It was completely unusable for my more advanced needs.
This is why I just tell people who use Photoshop and Adobe that want to switch to Linux to just accept dual booting. It’s realistically the only thing that won’t constantly lead to headaches with the software.
I have to use illustrator for work sometimes. I used to dual boot, now I use winboat. It’s a bit of a pain to set up initially but it works well once you’ve done that
Thank you so much for the detailed answer. I was not aware of that level of BS on the Photoshop front, though that does not surprise me. I guess I’m showing my age a bit by remembering Photoshop to just be a standalone program without any of that “not that long ago”.
Games work better on Linux than you might expect. Check out protondb for specific titles you’re thinking of. Most things I’ve just hit “play” on steam or heroic and they work n
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll definitely check it out.
You might be surprised by how capable linux gaming has gotten. The only thing really missing is AAA FPS type games. That doesn’t matter at all to me, but its something to consider. Just about everything else plays right out of the box.
honestly, if there would be a 100% office compatibility, photoshop on linux, and proper anticheat support, we would have 40% linux usage
I know it isn’t an exact solution, but people have created a Photoshop-like UI layout and keybindings for Gimp. That could help, should you choose to go with Gimp as the image editor.
I’ve dual booted my gaming rig with Windows 11 and Linux. The only thing I use windows for is Turtle WoW. If that would work on linux, I’d have no reason to have windows. I had it working on macOS, but it stopped working at macOS 26. and the emulation tool that i was utilising isn’t being updated anymore. so it’s unlikely going to work again. If Linux would run my Turtle WoW, I’d be 100% linux on my gaming rig. All my other games work out of the box. Anyway. Linux is the shit! I
I’m still using Windows 11 just from inertia, but I’ve been putting my kids on Linux Mint and Bazzite depending.
I don’t think I can get away from Windows, as a professional .NET developer, but I won’t likely have more than the one Windows laptop at this point. My entire home lab and home infra is Linux of one variety or another. If we count VMs, then I overwhelmingly using Debian.
Because you have to use VS Code instead of VS? You can always deploy to a Windows VM if you need to be sure IIS works. Though everything will just run on dotnet and nginx through a reverse proxy if you want to stay within Linux.
For most cases you can use Rider, which has a native Linux version. It doesn’t do database projects so if you use MSSQL without an
OEMORM you’re gonna want at least VS Code, but other than that it works fine.Of course if you’re a .NET developer in a corporate environment you probably don’t have a choice as you’re already using a Windows VM through Azure Virtual Desktop just so that your company can chain itself harder to daddy Microsoft.
I understand that .Net is nicely cross-platform, now.
But it’s still simplest to run whatever the boss is running.
Check out winboat
I’m going to drop this here. Both Affinity 2 if you bought it or the Free Affinity 3 works well on Linux.
https://github.com/seapear/AffinityOnLinux
I’ve started working with affinity and I’m pretty impressed so far. It does have some hiccups importing Photoshop brushes where the brush settings are wiped but I figure I have to look further into that to see if that can be remedied.
I have heard that running Photoshop in Winboat works. Winboat is a Windows container where you can install a whole windows system in to it. I ma not sure if it works with the latest Photoshop but I would assume it does.
Nice! Do you know if the Mac License works with the Affinity 2 Windows version as well?
Worth trying, though the new software is free and legacy affinity features are also free.
Basically if you don’t plan on using Canvas AI it’s free. Otherwise it’s moved to another monthly subscription service.
While I don’t generally recommend it, NVDIA has streaming options for games on Windows. You can even run this from a browser if you wanted, all within Linux. I would be surprised if you couldn’t use this for Photoshop or an alternative existed.
It’s just important to keep in mind this isn’t your computer, its a subscription to someone else’s computer. I just thought I’d mention this because it’s not commonly suggested and it’s nice to know avaliable options.
You can also just get a separate computer with MacOS for Photoshop and ditch the kernal games or maybe play them on Mac if they’re low end, and use Linux for everything else.
Maybe rootkits will be gone soon. 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop.