[glitchcrab]

I am in a similar boat; my media editing machine ruined windows 10 so that I can use Lightroom. But I would dearly love to ditch windows so I'm currently looking to try out running Lightroom under Winapps to see if it is usable. There's no way of passing the GPU through without something like SR-IOV so I'll have to see how it goes.

https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

[vladvasiliu]

I was thinking of doing that, but since that would require me to switch the monitor and whatnot, it would be just like using two PCs. And since I only use my desktop for LR and not much else, jumping through the hoops with emulation doesn't make much sense.

[glitchcrab]

How so? Winapps lets you run windows applications as if they were native to Linux, you interact with them the same way you would anything installed by apt/pacman/dnf etc. Unless I'm very much misunderstanding things (which I don't believe I am)

[vladvasiliu]

In the general case, I think you're right. WinApps seems to use RemoteApp functionality on windows to export just the window you're interested in from the virtualized guest vm to the host, which should behave mostly as a "native" app.

But you were talking about sr-iov, which is a whole different matter. Presumably, the goal is to have LR use that GPU for some of its functions. But LR doesn't support multiple GPUs: it does its computation on the same GPU that handles the output. For that, you need to connect the display to the passed-through GPU. Now, aside from intel, I don't think any mainstream GPU actually supports sr-iov, so you need to pass through the entire gpu to the guest VM (the host wouldn't see it anymore at all). This isn't how RemoteApp works, and I doubt WinApps handles this case.

I remember a project (Looking Glass?) that tried to somehow "bring back" the output to the host machine, but it didn't seem too robust at the time. I haven't followed it, so I have no idea if it's any better now, if it's still alive. If it does, this could possibly work if you had two GPUs (which I happen to have, since my CPU has an integrated GPU). But you'd still get the whole Windows desktop of the VM, not an RDP connection.