P: Provide support for Linux

FWIW I tried to run LR4 with Crossover from 11.3 up. This doesn't work in Linux Mint 13 (32 bit). I don't know enough about LR to offer any explanation, but would be happy to take part in any further experiments.

I think I will attempt LR on WINE with hand picked Windows DLLs. I really haven't given this any serious effort, only looked for others' solutions. I'll let you know what I come up with over the weekend. If I get it to work I will post my results on this forum with which DLLs to replace. I will start with LR 4 and Windows XP seeing as I don't have any other version of LR available to me now. After XP I will skip VISTA and go straight to 7. The down side is if I get this to work, it will only be available to legitimate Windows users (shouldn't be too bad said Windows XP computers are about as common as flies in a dumpster in back of a fish market).
Also, as I release my findings, hopefully the rest of the forum users here could help me with alpha testing.
Wish me luck!

Sure, I had the extension installed but anyway my printer is on the network so this is not an USB issue 🙂

P.S. Make sure that you install the VirtualBox Extension Pack else you will only have USB 1.1 support and printing will be very very slow (12 Mb /s / 1.5 MB /s). USB 2.0 is 480 Mb /s / 60 MB /s) without overhead.

There are many reason not to use WINE, (don't even get me started), however there is always reputation and the bottom dollar to consider. Here is my logic:
1) A native version would be awesome, but when porting to different operating systems and deadlines to meet / revenues to generate, a very broken version that deters customers has often surfaced.
2) Small modification of the program by their creators is much easier especially since the WINE DDLs are open sourced.
3) The WINE community code could benefit for Adobe's input.
4) A true percentage of the Linux community customer base would be established by LR phoning home with the true OS the user is running. This could provide a stepping stone for a native version.
5) I am a Linux believer but from a programmers aspect, writing graphically intensive native code for all of the major Linux distributions can be a headache. It's a good idea to offload as much processing to the GPUs as possible, but NVIDIA, INTEL, AMD, binary and open source drivers make this difficult. There are allot of variables to consider. On another note, Darktable does to many of the things LR does (even GPU accelerated), just not as many community created filters which turns off many photographers.

For those customers that insist on running LR on a Linux Distro, I do create a Windows XP / (7) VM (VirtualBox), and create an icon that open in seamless mode with no Windows taskbar. This gives the illusion of running the program in a native environment (yes the customers actually know what is going on) and is "good enough" for them. The tweaks I do are exactly as mentioned by "Piotr Jaczewski ", however on RAM limited environments, I will allow host caching for the virtual HDD if the user needs other major programs running. (Prevents alot of HDD thrashing when Windows goes to use the pagefile).

The largest single performance boost I can recommend for anyone is "get yourself a solid state drive".

Whew... In closing, I wonder if anyone has tried Codeweaver's support for LR.

OSS alternatives are getting better and better at lens correction and denoise based on sensors profiles. In dt I get excellent results in darktable. And the momentum is very good...

open source alternatives are getting better and better. LR as it is today (no cloud version, with a lifetime license) is way better - you get consistent colours for example and a large database of lens and camera color profiles - you don't get that in OSS alternatives.

I would loose interest in LR if it would be licensed "per-month" thou...

Pascal,
I work with smaller RAW's from C5Dm2, but performance is very similar to this from bare machine. I work with files that are stored on my linux machine and are connected to VM as network drives. Make sure you leave at least 6G for VM, and you have more than 1 virtual cpu in VM settings (i've enabled 8, so my VM can use all hardware threads). Check in BIOS if virtualization for your CPU is enabled (also, your CPU must support this feature, what is very important) and then check 'Enable VT-x/AMD-V' checkbox on Acceleration tab of VM settings. I think that 3D and 2D acceleration from Display tab, may be important.

From my benchmarks, on my i7 @3,6GHz there is no more that 5-10% decrease in performance in cpu processing time.

+1 for a wine friendly version. Even Civ 5 is made wine friendly.

Using any VM for LR is a bad idea. Any type of graphics emulation means colour compression. If you want consistent color you need a native app or one running in wine.

And I have 8Gb of memory with a 4-cores at 2.53 Ghz.