How can I get a stable Photoshop running on Linux?

Question

My OS is Debian - I've heard of Wine and virtualization software such as Virtualbox.. I'm wondering what to go with for stability as Wine was kinda bug prone when I last tried it for some other Windows software.

Answer 1

Crossover officially supports Photoshop as "silver". This means that there are some bugs, but they're working on improving support. They also have an extensive tips section.

(Crossover is a commercial version of Wine)

Answer 2

Use VMWare Workstation with a Windows XP or Windows Vista Installation. The latest version provides you functionality to access the application integrated to the Desktop Environment. , That is, you can run a Windows application in a window on your Linux Desktop.

Photoshop will work like a native Linux application, while the process runs under the virtual machine.

Answer 3

• There are notes at Running Adobe Photoshop on Wine Wiki
  (check if you have all that covered already).
• There are Adobe Photoshop Alternatives For Linux Desktop,
  
  • and, some more for Linux also at 31 Free & Powerful Photoshop Alternatives.
• There is also a Stackoverflow question: Best way to use Photoshop CS3 in Linux.
• Then, you can vote @PollDaddy: Would you buy Adobe software if it were available on Linux

Answer 4

So I went ahead and installed VirtualBox 3, gave it around 500 MB of virtual memory and it seems very very stable.

Photoshop CS4 runs fine inside XP, now if I could only mount my main local filesystem inside of XP without resorting to one shared directory that'd be nice :)