First and foremost - SORRY if this is the wrong place to post this. I will happily move/delete it if necessary. I always feel insecure when (occasionally) posting stuff.
And really sorry if this will turn into a long post!
I finished my PhD some 2 months ago and was invited to give some classes. I was doing it already but mostly for CV only, and ended up buying this MSI GF63 Thin 10SCXR laptop about 2 years ago because I was asked to teach Blender and my previous machine (Lenovo Thinkpad T470s) was not really up to it. And the CV matters… I hope!
But after all the struggles (read docx vs odt stuff and me being the “odd one out”) I was really put against the wall. I need to use 2 Adobe software packages (Premiere Pro and After Effects) but I use… Linux.
So I’m thinking my options are:
1 - Clean up the machine and install Windows on it. I have a desktop PC, also with Endeavour OS, so at least at-home I would have MY system. But I would have to spend 8 (plus) hours each day using a system from which I detached myself years ago…
2 - Dual boot. Get another disk, search for a good tutorial and go with it. I dual booted a long time ago, it is not the best option because you tend to find yourself always on the wrong system when you need THAT file…
3 - Upgrade my system. This is my preferred solution. Invest in RAM (maybe max out at 64 GB?) and a bigger disk or disks. I am however afraid that my system (processor/graphics) are not up to the challenge…
So I need opinions from someone that uses/knows about the software and what solution would they go with (please don’t say 4th solution - new machine because… at the moment it is out of question).
Just trying to understand… You’re going to teach with Premier and After effects? If not, are you adverse to using some of the alternatives like Davinci out there?
Otherwise, I had to do this with some projects a few months ago. I wasn’t able to get Photoshop to run properly through Wine so I ended up running a Windows 10 VM and installing it there. Not sure if it would work with premier, but it’s something to think about. Now, I just dual boot with a separate Windows drive. Not ideal, but it just works. When you’re trying to hit deadlines that’s the most important thing.
EDIT: Looking at your hardware… You’re going to be able to run Premier but it’s going to be sloooooow. Just speaking from experience. I used to have an RTX 1660Ti and 16gb of RAM (can’t remember what my cpu was) and it worked well, but rendering took forever.
I am not sure I understand how this would help you. Isn’t the primary issue that you have a requirement to run tools that don’t run on Linux? How would adding hardware help?
Maybe they mean that they want to run a vm with Windows and have a good amount of ram available to be able to assign to the vm and do a gpu pci-passthrough but that would require a second gpu unless their current cpu has an integrated video chip.
You could use a virtual machine, either way: Linux host (=preferred) or Windows host. Then you can use both systems simultaneously.
Then the amount of RAM is important, but nothing overwhelming is needed. I use virtualbox virtual machines on a laptop with 24 GB of RAM, and for me that is actually more than I need (probably 16GB would be OK too). I don’t have to use swap at all.
But virtual machine slows down the system inside it somewhat, and graphics might not be top notch, so using it depends on your needs.
Dual boot is reasonable if good performance is more important than the flexibility to use both systems at the same time.
I’m afraid I cannot use DaVinci or other approaches… It has to be these 2 packages. Not my choice or say in the matter…
I used After Effects in a Virtual machine before but it is not optimal… So reading your answer and the others below I really think the solution will probably be… bite the bullet of dual boot…
Yeap, hardware wise this is not optimal and will be slow… I haven’t had the chance to look into the curricula but my hope is that I can get away with teaching and doing some editing and some small (intelligent ) renders and then advise the students regarding planning their editing and so on but avoid expensive effects to try and minimize render times.
Sorry I should have been more explicit.
My idea was to add more hardware to have a better virtualization experience. Currently I have 16GB RAM and running a VM with Windows and After Effects with 8GB is the bare minimum for After Effects and it shows…
So my idea was along the lines of “I cannot change the processor but what if I beef it up in terms of RAM?”
Exactly. I use one already but with 16GB only so I assigned 8GB to Windows on VM… But After Effects and Premiere - as minimum - need 8GB. I only tested with After Effects and didn’t do anything “fancy” or intensive but you could tell, not in starting up the software or something but in adding effects and doing the pre-caching/pre-rendering, that some lag existed. But I was also afraid to add more RAM to the VM and then get the host system lagging…
So I think that probably - since I cannot really afford to buy another machine - my best option is to add a bigger disk and a bit more RAM so I can have some “room” and then dual boot.
What do you think? ( I foresee that I’ll be back searching the forum regarding dual booting )
How do those products run under virtualization? You would want to do some testing to see if it is even viable. Are they GPU intensive or CPU intensive?
I only tried After Effects and it… runs. They are (to the best of my knowledge) both CPU and GPU intensive, depending on the task at hand - if you’re rendering versus editing but really don’t know how to measure it so I can better answer.
What I noticed was that After Effects misbehaved once or twice and would randomly close on me… not all the time, just sometimes it would act like that.
Having bigger RAM helps with virtual machines for sure. And more bigger disk may help too if the current disk is too small for the needed stuff.
But you say your work is CPU and GPU intensive. That may mean dual boot would be a better choice. Unless you want to try GPU passthrough with the VM, which I’ve never done but some others here have.
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Yeah, I’ve been considering and I think that I will dual boot (in separate SSDs). If possible I will still try to upgrade at the very least one of my current disks, since both are around 250 GB and I feel it will be “short” for Windows and the Adobe software. And of course… I might add a bit more RAM, if the price is right
) renders and then advise the students regarding planning their editing and so on but avoid expensive effects to try and minimize render times.