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Comment by k0n2ad | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu is a fantastic distribution of a magnificent OS. I just wish I could run design apps like Flash and Photoshop on it (and no, GIMP just doesn't do it for me).

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Give VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) a try. I run Photoshop CS4, Rosetta Stone v3, and backup my BlackBerry inside it with minimal problems. GIMP didn't do it for me either.

I use VirtualBox as well. And I also use WINE, but even though you can run Office 2K7 (and you can't go around it as a student, in particular as a business student) in WINE, which I do for short edits and to only view documents, I still mainly use Office on the emulated WinXP. Office fells snappier on the emulated machine, and especially because of Antialiasing of fonts text is easier to read. Overall it's just nicer to work with and it crashes a lot less... :-)

I've now been running Ubuntu for over a year for my own side business, for my consulting gig and as a student and I haven't had any issue I couldn't solve and one of the main solutions is to bow to the majority in some cases and use emulated XP or WINE.

Use autohinting [http://www.spodesabode.com/discussion/51/making-ubuntu-look-...] and Droid fonts and u'll see what a difference it makes

Thank goodness in my engineering department matlab or excel are acceptable. Matlab works well in linux and is a much cheaper more powerful option than the office student edition paired with openoffice. (My school runs 2003 office though so thats a big difference in teachers required file formats).

The new ubuntu has better font smoothing by default however I don't think that transfers into wine sadly but at least you found a setup that works.

As long as you're paying for PS, check out Codeweavers' Crossover Linux. You can run native Windows programs under Linux (Crossover is a tweaked version of Wine).

It looks like Photoshop isn't quite there yet though: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/cat/?cat_id=...

It is one of the top applications that they are working on: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/toplists/

According to AppDB, Photoshop CS1 works great, so if you have or can procure an older version, this might be an option. (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...)

If I remember the Wine Weekly News report correctly, I think Disney wanted it working on their Linux machines they used for rendering, and committed back all their fixes to Wine. So whatever that version was is probably pretty usable.

I find VMWare performs quite well for that stuff. Still, I don't want to use Windows even in that scenario. So I just use a Mac instead. I think if just Photoshop had a decent counterpart on *nix that'd be enough to get me to switch.

I'm in a similar boat with the GP.

The main obstacle for migrating completely is a handful of the usual software titles, and tablet support. For tablet computers, like it or not, Vista is still the best, hands down.

But my jaw just dropped with the out-of-the-box support in Jaunty. It is marvellous. If multi monitor works just as smoothly, today might just be the day.

How well does VMWare work for you? My guest OSes are always as lean as possible with all graphics stripped out, and they are still laggy.

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