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The question emerged given the date of this post.

Wine or virtual machine (VirtualBox) to run apps (eg. Photoshop)

I just want to know to this date, which solution would be nail it in terms of speed, FPS, low memory & cpu consumption.

Yoarthur
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    I think the answer"Run on WINE first. If the functionality is really taking a beating, then use a VM. There's has been absolutely no cases for me where a program that runs fine in WINE runs faster on a VM. Its normally more snappier via WINE." still holds true – Panther Feb 09 '18 at 03:51
  • It would be useful something like this Wine specification, https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=6584

    , but from Virtual Box.

     – Yoarthur Feb 09 '18 at 04:21
  • Photoshop CS2 runs perfectly on WINE – ravery Feb 09 '18 at 04:55

1 Answers1

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Short answer

WINE is faster and uses less resources than a VM, especially if the VM is emulating a high speed and/or multicore processor.

Long answer

WINE is a command shell. It takes Windows commands/function calls and converts them to Linux commands/function calls. Thus it runs at near native speed and has native access to all system hardware. However, it is not a true windows install, so some programs either won't run or require very specific settings.

A VM is an emulator. It is a program that pretends to be a CPU, GPU and hardware of a computer. Thus, everything runs within this emulation environment with user interfaces being fed to/read from the host system. VM's can take an actual Windows install and run all programs that would normally run in Windows. However, the down side is lower performance and higher resource usage, because you are running the emulator in addition to the program. I don't remember exactly, but I believe the load of an emuulator is 1.5-2 times the the CPU you are emulating. ie A 1 GHz emulator will use 1.5-2 GHz of CPU when running a program.

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ravery
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