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Talking Cat Photos
Inspiring
December 17, 2019
Answered

Running Lr in a Windows 10 virtual machine

  • December 17, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 5735 views

Hi,

 

Can anyone advise on whether Lr Classic runs in a Windows 10 VMWare virtual machine?  My original plan for managing my new PC (32GB RAM, Ryzer 5 2600, 500GB SSD and 2TB hard drive, NVIDEA GeForce 1030) was to put Ubuntu 18.04.2 on the metal and then run all other OSes I use as VMWare virtual machines.  At present the PC runs Windows 10 Pro 1909.  I have experiece of doing this with other PCs but that was before I started using Adobe tools. 

 

I susepct running the tools in a Windows VM is definitely "not recommended" by Adobe but could I ask if anyone has tried it?  I have thought of spinning up a test Windows 10 VM to experiment but as that is a non-trivial amount of work in itself I wanted to gauge what the community throught first   On my present set up, Lr and Ps run fine though I can't get full graphics accleration to work with Lr. But full graphics acceleration does work with Ps!  Possibly one  consequence of moving to a VM would be losing all graphics accelerations?

 

Any thoughts would be most welcome.  Thanks in advance.

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Correct answer johnrellis

I can't speak to your exact proposed configuration. But for testing purposes, I've run for many years LR on Windows 10 in a Parallels VM on Mac OS. That configuration has always been sluggish. Moving Develop sliders is a little jerky, and importing photos from the host OS file system (via a network drive set up by Parallels) is slow, as is importing photos from a USB drive or card. Graphics acceleration is completely disabled by LR.

 

But I think you definitely test it.

 

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2 replies

Talking Cat Photos
Inspiring
December 18, 2019

Thank you John.  That's exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for.  Also the behaviour you describe is pretty much what I feared would be the result.  Perhaps sometime over the Christmas break I will test it on my own hardware but I shan't invest a huge amount of time in it.  Since buying the PC earlier this year, I have moved from Photoshop Elements to a Lr/Ps subscription which suits me far better.  Looks like running on native Windows is probably best.

Participant
February 9, 2021

Hey mate, any news you'd like to share with us?? I am thinking of the same thing as you (running LrC on a VM). Is it too sluggish? any workarounds? any way to enable HW acceleration? Kidnly let us know!

johnrellis
johnrellisCorrect answer
Legend
December 18, 2019

I can't speak to your exact proposed configuration. But for testing purposes, I've run for many years LR on Windows 10 in a Parallels VM on Mac OS. That configuration has always been sluggish. Moving Develop sliders is a little jerky, and importing photos from the host OS file system (via a network drive set up by Parallels) is slow, as is importing photos from a USB drive or card. Graphics acceleration is completely disabled by LR.

 

But I think you definitely test it.

 

[Use the reply button under the first post to ensure replies sort properly.]