Use Photoshop in Virtualbox, is it worth the hassle?
Solution 1:
As I see 12.04 as a tag on your question, I assume you have a good machine box on your hand (some information about this will help to exactly answer your question).
So:
I have a dual-2.3Hz box with 6 GB of RAM (I think at least 2 GB of RAM its important to run good virtualboxs) and:
- I made the transition Windows->Ubuntu 11.10 (12.04 not stable yet at this moment) very smoothly, so I really reccomend.
- Windows 7 inside a virtualbox runs like a devil. No problem to easy or hard tasks, everything done quickly, no bugs.
- You can have a dual-boot configuration if you insist in having Windows 7 at bare metal level(dumb option, IMHO)
- With Wine, many applications(including Photoshop) runs smoothly too.
I advice a Ubuntu 11.10 with virtualbox hanging your windows to avoid little bugs in Photoshop with Wine, but maybe doesn't worse the work to set up. Wine rules too. What you have to leave behind is Windows, without fear, and be happy. After 1st tasty(sooo tasty!-), you'll never come back.
Solution 2:
I think it is worth the hassle. Like yourself, I switched to Ubuntu from Windows and the only app I really missed was Photoshop. I tried installing Photoshop through Wine first, but it occasionally froze or crashed. Since you can loose hours of work, I think that is not an acceptable solution.
For me installing Photoshop through VirtualBox solved those problems, and after a little bit of tweaking the app feels as if it was a native Ubuntu app. I describe how to setup Photoshop on Ubuntu in my blog post How to use Photoshop in Ubuntu.
Solution 3:
I use Ubuntu as my main OS and do pretty much what you are suggesting, except that I use VMWare Player rather than VirtualBox as I find it easier to configure and it works superbly well. i have been doing this for a couple of years now without any problems
Solution 4:
im running Photoshop CS 4 with wine, i think it's better than youu use virtualbox...
See also this list of Photoshop versions that run with Wine.