When Zorin 18 was still in beta, I saw a marketing image that had the Photoshop and Excel icons in the taskbar. Although I've migrated to GIMP, I'm asking for information on whether Photoshop can run normally, that is, with all the features it has in Windows?
The other question is regarding Audacity. Although we have the updated version of it for Zorin, in Windows I used an Audacity plugin called OpenVINO. In research I conducted, I found a routine for installing this plugin on Linux, but it seemed somewhat complicated for me, as I'm still a novice in Linux. So I thought about running the Windows version of Audacity on Zorin using Wine, but in this case, I would like to know if the plugin installation would work as well as in Windows.
Please note that these are just questions; in case of impossibility, I will still keep Zorin as my main system.
The images were referring to web apps, these are a built in Zorin 18 feature that lets you take a website and turn it into a standard application dedicating resources to just that URL,
Since Photoshop/MS Office and some other programs have web app versions and at this stage won't port their main desktop applications, web apps are the closest and best way to run them.
For audacity that's an interesting one personally I'd give it a shot, two things I've done for windows applications is to either just bring the installer exe onto Zorin and try run it, or alternatively if that fails install it on a windows install plug in a USB and transfer the entire install onto that USB then onto my Zorin OS machine and try run the standard exe
Audacity is available as snap package in (if you want to use snap packages, this is maybe the easiest solution without using a compatibility layer as wine or building it from sources):
Out of curiosity I visited codeweavers.com to see if Adobe Creative Suites ran at all. In respect of CS2, it only seemed to work best on Macs, with a rider that the 4/5 Star rating was based on an earlier version of CrossOver so not currently valid. Codeweavers ironically calls itself 'the liberator' but true liberation comes from using alternatives that are not dependent on .dlls. Whilst I can appreciate there are no equivalents to Adobe Photoshop (or Illustrator) for Professionals, for those with less demands, mere mortals do have GIMP, Krita and darktable. One Windows photo package that does run well in WINE is PaintShop Pro 8.0 available on archive.org:
They used to host version 9.0 but perhaps the contributor pulled it. Things went south when Corel purchased PaintShop Pro, the same with Painter (I still regret forgetting to claim 256 free brushes when 5.5 of Painter was given away on the cover of a PC magazine).
As for Excel there are various open source alternatives, LibreOffice Calc, PlanMaker from SoftMaker, OnlyOffice sheets. However there are certain functions that can only be carried out in Excel that are not available in the open source counterparts, and that is down to proprietary ownership of special functions/routines that are copyrighted which is the only aspect that prevents spreadsheet Professionals from making the switch.
I don't like newer versions of Audacity as it sends back data as to what you are doing with it. The last non-telemetry version was 2.2.
"Another popular choice is Tenacity, a free and open-source fork of Audacity that emphasizes privacy and has a similar feature set, making it a strong alternative for users concerned about Audacity's privacy policies.
For more advanced audio production, Ardour is a powerful, open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) that supports multitrack recording, MIDI sequencing, and video editing, though it has a steeper learning curve compared to Audacity.
Similarly, Traverso DAW is an open-source DAW offering non-destructive editing, multitrack recording, real-time effects processing, and MIDI sequencing, with an intuitive interface and active development."
Good morning,
Thank you for the reply.
Regarding Photoshop, it was just a question, as I'm using GIMP, which has been sufficient for my needs. Besides that, there's also Photopea, which also has many features and is online. I access some web platforms using Zorin's web applications. When you mention the "integrated feature in Zorin 18 that allows you to take a website and turn it into a standard application, dedicating resources only to that URL," are you referring to "web applications" or is there another method available?
I'm not sure if the translation here is good, but I understood that you are suggesting Audacity, which is available in the repositories. In this sense, I have Audacity installed via Flathub, but what I thought of using from Windows is because I want to install the OpenVINO plugin, which is available for Audacity.
Hello,
I already have GIMP installed, which has been sufficient for my needs. I use it for designing ads and also for websites. I also have Photopea online. I have Krita, Darktable, and RawTherapee installed as well. The question about Photoshop was due to curiosity or in case a need for it arises in the future, but at the moment it's not necessary.
My use of Audacity is fairly simple. There are basically two main uses: creating a voice recording with background music and then performing individual processing. The OpenVINO function in Audacity that I intended to use is the ability to take an audio file and separate the voice from the background music.
I use it daily for recording around an hour of audio. I built a small app in python which takes the audio file and transcribes it to text using local LLM (Whisper). It still takes me another hour to go through and correct it.
If you have not yet installed it, then I suggest that @Forpli solution above is best, having read the OpenVINO plugin page on Github.
This page suggests that if you install the Snap version, then the openVINO plugin will work out of the box, as Forpli pasted above.. Otherwise, they give instructions for compiling it on Linux.
I am running the Flathub version, so I may have a go at compiling it and see what happens. I dont have time immediately but will report back.
If you are OK to use Snap then it looks like that should work.
I followed the steps and installed snap audacity, then the openVINO plugin, added myself as user to the 'render' group, and proceeded to download the required models. In my case, the whisper model for transcription.
This amounted to 20GB... as you can't tell it to only download the model you'd rather use, it downloads all Whisper models, then you select which you want when you finally come to transcribe your audio. Thats a whopping amount of drive space.
The models for music separation and noise reduction which I also installed, are small.
In use, I don't like that snap-audacity doesnt use the normal system file dialog with theme but resorts to a very basic-looking affair. It also preset to a subdirectory buried deep in the snap file hierarchy, but did allow me to navigate out of that - I'm simply not used to snap applications so I don't know if this is snap in general or just audacity?
In use - I am very impressed with the speed of transcription. The beauty of this openVINO plugin is it utilises specific Intel tech found on Core ultra processors to use the NPU or GPU instead of CPU.
The transcription is output as labels in a track below your audio and can be exported - but only in a format complete with timestamps. Ideal for movie srt files etc, but not suitable for my use case. I'd have to write a utility to strip out the timecode and other formatting.
For @Dunham I also installed the music separation module - it works. I've never used this type of tool before (my music involves creating tracks and putting them together rather than dissecting them) so I don't know how well it compares, but it certainly all works on linux.
