I am not looking for software alternatives. Is the best method still to dual boot?
Don’t use linux then. You don’t want alternatives, that’s fair, but when there are good, even better alternatives like Darkroom, and you don’t want to focus on doing the work that the app does, but rather on what the name of the app is, then stay with windows.
I use the web based Lightroom as an installed PWA for most of what I need. I’ve got a windows 11 VM that I can run for a few features that are left out of the web version or if I need something in Photoshop that photopea can’t do. If I really need better performance for something I’ve got a Windows “To Go” install on a nvme in an external enclosure I can boot into.
My current photo workflow is to import and use geeqie to quickly batch rename, and sort with ratings. Then I upload the rated selections to lightroom for editing.
I dabble a bit with raw therapee and darktable. But I do a lot of editing on my android phone and tablet on the couch. So adobe keeps me locked in.
The web version of light room is so close to feature parity with the desktop version (not classic) that they really should just flesh it the rest of the way out since they will never make a native Linux version.
I am not looking for software alternatives.
Then just use Windows or a Mac.
Dual boot sucks because Windows likes to overwrite partitions critical to booting Linux without warning.
You could use Virtual Machine Manager (GUI frontend for QEMU/KVM, the most performant VM software on Linux). Here is a good guide on how to optimize the settings for a Windows 11 guest. I’ve used this guide to get SolidWorks, a CAD program, to work decent, so I assume other professional programs like Lightroom will run well too.
separate drive with rEFInd as boot manager is fine. Windows will sometimes still alter the boot sequence to make it take priority, but that’s a relatively quick fix and doesn’t happen all that often.
I tested Lightroom 5 under Wine. It worked but it was a short test, maybe something is not working. Test it by yourself, if you manage to get it. I think that was the last version without cloud shit.
install lightroom, disable updates then run it with wine. you will only know how well it works or if it needs fiddling if you attempt to run it. it will most likely work in some capacity.
A VM would probably do fine.
Wine, Bottles, Lutris…etc
Edit: this was a different kind of solution someone else sent me: https://medium.com/@pascalwhoop/how-to-get-lightroom-running-on-linux-with-webassembly-and-nativefier-a69dd9d9f647
Will performance still be comparable to native windows install?
I was thinking about using windows as a docker container
Docker containers share host os kernel - can’t be used to run a different os.
Your options:
- Run windows in a VM. You assign some of your PC resources (ram, CPU cores, storage) to vm. That windows VM is going to be within 1-2% of a PC with the specs matching resources assigned to VM. You won’t get GPU acceleration unless you pass the entire GPU to VM, but it doesn’t matter for Lightroom. Will run perfectly.
- Run Lightroom with Wine. It runs as just another Linux program via a translation layer. It will get access to all resources your PC has and it won’t waste resources running entire 2nd os in a VM, but there is a performance impact of the translation layer. Performance impact varies depending on specific piece of software and sometimes it even runs faster.
Edit: it turns out it does like GPU acceleration, so performance impact without GPU passthrough will be noticeable at least when opening images. Running it on wine is possible, but a pain - it requires manual workarounds and it doesn’t run perfectly even with them.
We’re all running high performance games through the same thing all the time now. Benchmarks best Windows in most cases.
You’ll be more than fine.
VMs won’t do for long, because you won’t have proper acceleration as it’s required by gfx apps like Lightroom. Sure, they’ll work, but you’ll experience slowdowns. You can run accelerated VMs, but I find them buggy.
If you’re going to dual boot, you should install Linux on a separate DRIVE, not just a partition, and install the bootloader on that second drive. You force Linux to do that by disabling in the BIOS the Windows drive first, before installation. Then, you re-enable it again. Then you can choose what to boot at using F12 during boot time. If you put them on the same drive, Windows will eventually overwrite the bootloader.
The ideal thing is to actually move to Darktable. https://mathiashueber.com/migrate-from-lightroom-to-open-source-alternative/
GPU pass through with VFIO is literally how services like GeForce Now, PSN Streaming work. It’s not too buggy if your system is set up properly and it’s far better than dual boot.
Darktable doesn’t have AI denoise, and also doesn’t have camera profiles for fuji RAF files, just off the top of my head.
Yes, it does not have ML denoise, but there are very good reasons why you don’t want to have that in your raw pipeline. Sure, after raw development is fine, but denoise in a raw pipeline needs to maximise the signal-to-noise ratio. Machine learning denoising would introduce hallucinations, which are not real signal, and that’s why it’s best kept out of raw files.
Well, yes, some specific camera support features are missing, such as Fujifilm look-up tables, it still is the best raw editor I have used in my entire life and I can highly recommend it.
I will try it based on your second paragraph.
Are you sure the pipeline works that way? I know what you mean and it would seem like a huge oversight on their part to apply the denoise before the other edits. I would assume that increasing exposure, for example, would ignore the applied denoise rather than apply it overtop? If that wording makes any sense
Regardless I’ve used it to rescue photos I’ve taken on a nexus 4 over a decade ago, making them look like proper photos, and I find the feature so useful that it’s irreplaceable to me
The other feature is the AI content aware fill. In darktable, can you circle a piece of garbage on the ground and effortlessly remove it? Or do you have to do some manual clone stamping etc etc?
In a recent instance, a friend requested an album cover from a 3x2 image that I needed to expand to be 1x1. Can you tell that the left and right edges of this are not real? I don’t think I would have been skilled enough to pull this off without AI tools. https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1356058193_10.jpg
Please understand me correctly: Machine learning does have its use as an image editing. but not in raw development. Sure, VFX are fine, but the goal of raw development is to make the files that the camera has put out look as good as possible. And for that, machine learning is inadequate, because again, hallucinations and other defects. Once you have processed your image with the raw development software, sure. Machine learning, denoising, expansion and other VFX will certainly work. But my recommendation is to keep it out of raw development, not for purist reasons, but because there’s genuinely no reason to use it, as we need to get precise results from raw first, and then we can add our VFX on top of that.
About the raw pipeline of Darktable, this is one of its greatest features. You can freely reconfigure it to suit your needs. By default, it uses a scene-referred workflow and you should really stick with that. But if you’re an advanced user, you can freely shuffle the modules around as you like, just like you can do in DaVinci Resolve.
Edit: For beginners, really stick with the modules that you’ll find in the different headers. Also, manipulate your modules starting from bottom to top, as this is the processing order for the modules.
The ideal thing is to actually move to Darktable. https://mathiashueber.com/migrate-from-lightroom-to-open-source-alternative/
Be prepared to commit some time to the transition though. I installed darktable and gave it a try a couple days ago. There’s enough similarity to make you think it’ll be an easy transition, but it sure wasn’t for me. It took me an hour to do something that would have taken 5 mins in Lightroom. I’m glad to have it, and it seems like a powerful tool, so I’m not complaining, just sayin… be prepared to commit some time to learning where everything is.
password protect your bios. that’s the only way i found for windows not to mess it up on my machine, seriously.
Not.
Now to be slightly more helpful (apologies for the provocation) I suggest you consider alternatives to Lightroom. I know that instantly you will receive countless comments on how alternatives are just nowhere near as good as Lightroom… and that’s OK. IMHO it’s OK because I bet YOUR usage of Lightroom isn’t the usage of others. So… I recommend you forget the brand “Adobe” or the product “Lightroom” and instead you list here the actual function of a tool you need.
This way, by listing actual needs rather than a bundle product with branding and specific UX, you go back to the root of your problem, namely WHY do you need such a piece of software in the first place.
Sure, you might end up with an entirely different workflow. Sure it will probably be absolutely alien at first… but so was learning how to use that piece of software in the first place too. Right now you do have the concepts, so replacing one click by a command line tool, or 1 piece of software by 10, is IMHO acceptable. What you will hopefully have in the end if YOUR workflow that is even more adapted compared to what you had first. It will be “weird” and maybe nobody else will get it but for you it will be exactly what you need.
No photo editing software even comes close to lightroom. As I said in the OP I’m simply not interested in alternatives.
Right, then I can’t help you.
To clarify for others though as I guess I wasn’t clear based on the downvotes : I’m not suggesting a single piece of software is a viable alternative to Lightroom. Rather I’m saying Lightroom itself is a collection of algorithms dedicated to photo editing wrapped in a UX one is familiar with. On the other hand ImageMagick (just to pick one I know relatively well) is a set of command line tools for image editing. It’s mostly used as a backend with other tools as interface. I imagine there are plenty of alternatives to ImageMagick too, probably some that can include arXiv STOA algorithms for photo editing, maybe some even with a GUI but my point again is to reconsider the workflow to understand how the tools one rely on actual work.
So to hopefully express myself better this time, ImageMagick + Gimp + Krita + some script in a Github repository based on an arXiv publication + I don’t know what + … all together or in part might be better for some people but no I don’t know an all-in-one open source alternative that cover ALL needs without them being expressed first.
Nothing offers the AI tools that adobe does. AI denoise is an irreplaceable feature for me.
Nothing you (nor I) know of but that doesn’t mean it’s the case. I can’t evaluate but https://www.openimagedenoise.org/ is publishing by Intel and in 2026 so maybe it’s good.
If you have a beefy computer try winboat
