I’m keeping it broad by not specifying a distro. I’m just curious is this a real option for actual editing professionals? As far as I understand you can make it work by running under Wine, but I’m guessing this comes with significant drawbacks. I’m having trouble finding any information on both the current state of things with running Premiere under linux (most info seems to be from 2018 for some reason), and the extent of the drawbacks in a quantifiable way.
I’m generally a pretty happy Mac OS user, but I always want to keep options open. I haven’t really tried to use Linux on desktop since the late 00s.
Yeah, build your own desktop, carefully pick a compatible GPU and then deal with access issues to the VM. Most ways to access the image coming out of the VM are either slow or glitchy. Unfortunately this isn’t a solution for people who need to do their daily jobs on those programs.
Ahaha very funny. So tell me, how are you passing the image from the passthrough GPU back to your system?
Last time I looked into passthrough (for qemu), it was non-trivial to set up, though. Has that gotten any easier?
There will be massive performance issues due to driver support and in the way modern Adobe apps use the GPU to handle a lot of the work. Over the past few years as GPU’s have become insanely powerful, Adobe have retooled a lot of their apps to make use of that number-crunching - before you could bruteforce it with a decent CPU but now a lot of program functions are handled by the graphics card - even things like canvas scaling and rotation are only active using the GPU.
Until Adobe make native versions (and there is corresponding driver support - nVidia run drivers built specifically for creative apps like those from Adobe and Autodesk), I wouldn’t even consider using Linux for any type of creative work, to be honest.
I wouldn’t even consider using Linux for any type of creative work, to be honest.
I create schematics and PCBs on it all the time. But that’s more engineering, not media and art.
Not only that. If all you need to deal with are still images Inkscape, Krita and to some extent GIMP are quite enough for my students, and I teach at an art university.
Interesting! I have some questions:
- Is editing a primary part of your job?
- How and why was ShotCut selected for your work?
- How do you feel about ShotCut compared to other editing software on Linux, Windows, and MacOS?
Thanks!
-Yes editing is a key part of my job. Although it’s plenty of simple editing and almost no fancy effects and so on. I need to cut video edits fast, modify audio, crop and scale video.
-Shotcut loads instantly and runs natively on linux. That’s the biggest selling point for me. It’s extremely simple and has a clean UI. Also it handles .ts mpeg containers easily. Some apps, even premiere have issues with that format.
-I tried Openshot, Kdenlive and a couple of other apps. ShotCut was lighter and simpler.
The reason, you aren’t finding anything, is that nobody really attempts to install premiere or after effects anymore on Linux. The alternatives have cought up and they are available for Linux.
- DaVinci Resolve provides the complete package. Video editor and (node based) compositor in one. Even outside of the Linux world there is a lot of momentum behind this tool, as I probably don’t have to tell you. Keep in mind, that the free version on Linux has some limitations, that the free versions on the other OS’s don’t have (missing h264 support for example)
- Left angle Autograph (https://www.left-angle.com/#page=95) is a young product, having seen its first release earlier this year. It’s a direct competitor to After Effects. A timeline based VFX tool. Unfortunately fairly expensive as well.
Back to your question: making things work with wine has a significant drawback. Your system can break with every update. So you’re not making it work just once but over and over again.
Is there any good alternative to Photoshop on Linux? That’s about the only thing I miss after switching
There’s GIMP but it seems a little clunky sometimes, I’ve heard krita is good for artists but I tend to just use this kind of thing for editing images
Honestly, no there isn’t. Even if Gimp can apparently do a lot of what Photoshop can, you have to first learn, then jump through 20 unintuitive hoops to get to the same result thst Photoshop can do in 2 clicks. Nothing compares as far as I’m concerned.
GIMP is currently missing non-destructive editing (a rather core feature), but that’s something they’re aiming to fix in 3.2. I don’t know when that’ll be here, but that will be a good day for GIMP.
You might have better luck with Affinity Photo—it doesn’t really work well through Wine yet, but it’s getting there: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/182758-affinity-suite-v204-on-linux-wine/
I personally use Affinity Photo on macOS and I’m really happy with it. I like it more than Photoshop, actually. Fair warning that it will rasterize all your text layers in .PSD files, so you’d want to be using only .afphoto files, but it’s impressive how good the .PSD support is otherwise. So, give it a year or two, and Affinity Photo might be in good shape in Wine! I mean, I can hope.
It’s a browser app though
Extremely laggy as PWA in chromium, less laggy in chrome and has to be used in a normal browser window in firefox
Doesn’t work if I’m not connected to the internet and also ads taking up ~10-15% of the window
When it’s working in firefox it seems like a decent alternative and even supports opening psds which is incredibly useful but not sure I’d want to run it in a browser, if it was open source could shove it in an electron wrapper and be done with it but doesn’t seem to be, their public GitHub only has branding and information
If you’ve to work with other people and/or you really need the Adobe tools my best advice if to forget it. Emulation and stuff like Wine, Bottles, Crossover is all cool until you try to install MS Office and it doesn’t work properly or Photoshop doesn’t work because it fails to identify the screen size. You can’t simply run those programs for everyday usage under Linux with good results.
