Linux and Digital Art - Annoying

[SteelyDan14]

I prefer Linux. Nothing wrong with Windows as I have used it most of my life, but I prefer Linux. Having said that, I am a graphic designer so Linux is really not an option for me so I have to do the annoying dual boot or have a machine just dedicated to graphics work. Why? Because Adobe products do not work on Linux.

Do they have alternatives to Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator? Yes... but they freaking suck. GIMP is the photoshop "equivalent" but do you know how hard it is just to draw a rectangle? Then try to manipulate it. FFS what a pain in the ass. The selection tools are garbage, there are STILL no adjustment layers and they only recently added CMYK support. GIMP is clearly 10 or so years behind Photoshop. GIMP is solid enough for basic editing and the casual user but that's about it.

Of course, the bigger problem for this forum is DAZ3D does not work on Linux either. Blender does, but not DAZ.

Are there any devs/modders besides me who use Linux? If so, what tools do you use?

 

[Arkanae]

I have tried. Like you, I have to admit failure. The Linux "equivalents" to the Adobe and Autodesk (I also do CAD) tools are vastly inferior.

Double boot is too much of an annoyance (I don't want to deal with the Windows desktop, especially not while doing dev), so having an actual Windows install isn't an option.

So far, I have been able to run some of these using a Windows VM. There is a performance impact for renders, but it's not huge enough to deter me. The main issue I still have, however, is peripherals. Tablets work... OK for the basic features, but aren't properly recognized.

 

[MissFortune]

Thread was necro'd, but I'll toss a couple pennies in since it's here.

You're experiencing the reason why you'll find basically no active artists on Linux. It's just not artist friendly. Some of that can be blamed on hardware manufacturers (Nvidia, looking at you.), but I don't think we'll ever see Linux get mainstream enough to see companies start building their software with Linux in mind.

So, there's either VMs or dual booting (as I'm sure you're aware.). Both are kind of a hassle, especially for Daz as you'll be seeing a bit of a performance hit if you use a VM. Dual booting is the most realistic choice here, but as mentioned, it can get pretty tedious.

As for Adobe alternatives, there are some good ones. It's browser-based and missing some of the more popular features (e.g. Camera Raw, Content Aware Fill, AI stuff, etc.), but PhotoPea could be worth a look. DaVinci is also very real competition for PP/AE, and I'd probably be using it if I felt like learning an entirely new software. But if you absolutely need Adobe? Yeah, you're kinda SoL. Though, you might be able to get

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?

 

[DSSAlex]

It's not terribly hard to get Daz installed but it can be a son of a bitch to get it to recognize video card drivers through a compatibility layer. I still mostly use a windows rendering rig, but I have run some tests where I got Daz up and running on my linux rig and piped it through the Iray server, which natively runs on Linux. There is also a thread about this here too

https://f95zone.to/threads/how-to-install-daz3d-on-linux-updated-with-new-method.101227/

 

[Velomous]

I realize this is old so I'm necroing here; but I have some recommendations.

GIMP... is OK, but I strongly prefer Krita over it, the interface is better and it's overall got a lot more features, it's better for image manipulation and for painting.

For painting specifically, I prefer Paintstorm Studio. It is a very good painting software that not that many people seem to know about and it works on linux. It's actually kinda my favorite painting application I prefer it even over photoshop for that although it's been a long time since I did digital art tbh.

InDesign is really not my scene but I know I had a rather decent alternative for it... I completely forgot what it was though

However if you're willing to shell out a bit, there's vivadesigner and pagestream... Vivadesigner seems to be positioning itself as an indesign replacement tool deliberately.

Illustrator is a bit tricky, the general recommendation is inkscape, and inkscape is pretty good for vector art too; there's also vectr if you want some fancy ai shit.

As for photoshop, well I already named the 2 main alternatives i'd suggest for painting, krita and paintstorm, but there's also a couple editing tools, like darktable and aftershot and pixeluvo...

Someone also made a chart, look:



As for Daz3D, last poster really said it all.

I just installed daz the other day i literally downloaded the installer from their site, and opened it with wine, and installed the thing, and it just worked (may have to use winetricks to install vcrun2010 and vcrun2022 tho).

But i couldn't use the gpu for rendering in it, and the scripts and favorites dropdown menus are completely unusable (just black windows basically), for my purposes this is good enough since I mostly just want to export the genesis models and morphs into game engines.

I also tested if rendering worked and it did (but gpu not working)

So even with minimal effort you can easily get daz 'mostly working' and with a bit more finagling such as following the guide he linked to you should be able to get it ''completely working'.

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As a side note MF is correct about the use of virtual machines, they are the lesser hassle compared to dual booting. So long as it's not too graphically intensive work, you can use virtual machines relatively easily. For windows VMs I would suggest vmware for the uninitiated; qemu if you want to go down a very deep rabbithole; but vmware

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graphical workloads; however it is limited to directx9-11 and opengl; so no vulkan, no dx12; kinda ass backwards cuz if they just supported vulkan u could run everything on it. With qemu (ideally through virt-manager/libvirt) you can go the vga passthrough route, so you could for example passthrough your igpu to the vm and get physical hardware accelerated graphics capabilities that way which should work for most things. But it is a pain in the ass to set up, you'll get basically native performance though.