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npolet | 8 years ago

This is what I've been waiting for. As a developer, I love developing on Linux, I just flow better with it, servers are Linux as well etc...

But I do a lot of design work and this is where I miss all the Adobe apps. I've found a good workflow with inkscape and it serves me well.

Using a Windows VM with the Adobe cc suite is fine, but it's not as clean as having it (somewhat) natively available.

Great work Wine team.

discuss

order

cookiecaper|8 years ago

I ran Linux natively as my sole workstation OS for nearly 10 years, and spent a lot of that time tinkering with WINE, including developing and submitting some patches, but eventually I had to give up because advanced things like Photoshop were too spotty in Wine and too slow in VMs.

My solution was ultimately to set up an Arch-based KVM hypervisor with a Windows 10 VM running as the main "workstation", with USB + GPU PCI passthrough and paravirt. The hypervisor also runs Linux VMs, from which I do development work via VNC and/or SSH.

This is the most convenient workflow situation for me, and allows the best of both worlds. It essentially makes Windows act like a desktop environment for a Linux box while maintaining practically-native overall performance for all workloads, including gaming and photo/video editing. It also grants the admin convenience of virtualized environments, since I can use zvols to snapshot everything at once, place clean resource limitations on each environment, etc.

It would only not work for Linux-based graphics development, but even then, you can get a second GPU and pass it through to another VM, running on a separate display.

Before I got the hypervisor set up, I ran Windows on the hardware with Linux VMs hosted in VirtualBox. The biggest issue with this (aside from the general shame and guilt of using Windows on the hardware) was that Windows would decide it wanted to turn off for MS-enforced updates and bring everything down. Now, Windows is separate and it can crash, reboot, or hurt itself all it wants, and rarely causes any real loss.

eslaught|8 years ago

Are there instructions anywhere on how to get started with something like this?

mncharity|8 years ago

> It would only not work for Linux-based graphics development, but even then, you can get a second GPU

My impression is that dGPU "hot" swapping between non-running guests has gotten easier. But that swapping to host after a guest is still a hardware/drivers/kernel "maybe it just works, or maybe you can't get there from here".

redtuesday|8 years ago

Since I read about this a few years ago I really want to try it, but I don't want to buy an extra GPU for it. I hope AMD [0] brings their SR-IOV implementation called MxGPU down to their mainstream GPUs, which allows to split a single GPU between host and guests. Apparently this would also be more secure than passthrough?

In order to not affect their pro GPU sales they could maybe limit the number of virtual GPUs from 16 to 2, which would be enough for the host and a single guest.

[0] or Nvidia, I don't care, but since Nvidia is the market leader they have less incentive than AMD.

berlam|8 years ago

On my list is a GPU passthrough setup, which is described in following blog post [1] (with screenshots). I did not set up it yet, but I will try it out next time I build up my home desktop from ground up.

[1] https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/

DogRunner|8 years ago

Would you be so kind and do a more in-depth write-up of your current setup? It really sounds awesome!

modzu|8 years ago

curious about this setup. screenshots?

usaphp|8 years ago

Have you tried figma.com? It’s web based and in many ways even better than Sketch app. I personally stopped using photoshop for graphic design long time ago and never look back

cercatrova|8 years ago

Figma is great, they have very interesting ways of solving problems, through rethinking from first principles of what makes a feature interesting or useful for the end user.

thinkloop|8 years ago

This looks fantastic, they are properly innovating and not just trying to be a web version of sketch. I just looked into how paths work (pen tool), and it is finally exactly how I originally envisioned they would work when I was first introduced to them decades ago. I never fully understood why the pen tool had a surprisingly high learning curve and general awkwardness. I assumed it was to meet some specific high-end needs of pro designers (I am an engineer first). Figma seems to be showing otherwise.

emmelaich|8 years ago

How about https://canva.com/ too.

Seems very polished to me -- but I'm not a web developer or graphic artist.

Rotareti|8 years ago

Does anyone know if there is an open source alternative to Sketch/Figma?