Right now I own a desktop PC dual booting Windows 7 and Xubuntu which I plan to move back to Opensuse and would like to move it to a full Opensuse environment with a VM to run Adobe CS3.
I still use CS3 (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) at home for odd-ball projects like logo design or web design for friends and whatnot. I’m no longer a design/marketing “professional” but who knows, my interest in Free/Linux/Opensuse is just starting to peak a bit. ANYWAYS!
My system is the following:
Motherboard: BIOSTAR H61MGC LGA 1155 Intel H61 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
Processor: Intel Pentium G850 Sandy Bridge 2.9GHz LGA 1155 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor
Graphics Card: SAPPHIRE 100314-3L Radeon HD 6870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP
RAM: Kingston HyperX Blu 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3
I built it on Newegg for about $600 as a “good enough” build to at least get some work done
Since I want to move CS3 over to a Virtual Machine I’m thinking I should upgrade the 4GB up to 8GB. I can run everything well enough with 4GB in a KDE desktop since the files usually stay a reasonable size. But in switching back and forth between host and guest, well, there’s a little bit of lag that is just noticeable for about a minute or so, kind of like an old Mac behaves.
My main two ideas are upgrading the RAM and updating my graphics card to something made with an Nvidia chipset (I was reintroduced to gaming by using linux of all things).
And to be clear, CS3 is the only thing that I need to carry over. Everything else I use; LibreOffice, Xchat, Deluge, VLC, web browsers, etc. are all readily available to linux-based systems. And the reason I want to return to Opensuse is the lack of hype and the overall feeling of pragmatism and maturity within the community. It seems to be the most task-oriented distro I’ve come across without being a toy in the tinkering sense of the word. I just want a stable, robust, mature environment and community to work with.
Any other recommendations or observations to consider?