So I have a situation. I really want to switch to Linux as my main gaming/production OS but need the Adobe suite as I am a graphic designer. Adobe is the golden standard for this industry (and likely to always be) so while Gimp and Inkscape might work, they are not feasible for my career. I also know that there will be situations where games just don’t run well or at all on Linux.
Dualbooting works but is not really worth it for me as I would have to stop what I’m doing and restart my PC. I heard that you can set up a single GPU passthrough for games and software but it seems complicated. How difficult would that be to set up for a new user to Linux? I would consider myself a tech savvy person but I know very little about the ins and outs of Linux. I have a massive GPU (XFX RX 6900 XT) with a big support bracket that covers the second PCIE slot so buying another GPU isn’t really feasible either.
I do have an Unraid server with decent specs that I use for a hosting Minecraft servers and Jellyfin so setting up a VM on that might be a good option.
What would you guys recommend me to do?
Not sure how good this advice is since I’m not a professional, but: You could try out running Adobe programs in a VM with VMWare (vmware.com). They have an excellent 3D acceleration support already. Just give your VM a good chunk of your hardware resources (I use half of my CPU cores and 3/4 of my system memory). I use that for running Affinity Designer 2 from Sarif, and it works quite well for me. Windows VM boots up in between 6 – 8 seconds and I have a shared folder, where I can drop stuff to interact between my Windows VM and my Linux main system. But like I said, I’m not a professional.
And for using vmware, you can give it some of your video memory from your graphics card, so if you need decent graphics, you don’t have to do gpu passthrough and you don’t need multiple gpus.
Edit: Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDrbNgM6gXk