Winapps doesn't do GPU passthrough so performance is just unbearable for Photoshop.
Your options:
- GPU passthrough
- Slow performance
- Photopea
- Photoshop web
- GIMP
I went with PS Web & Photopea.
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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Don't forget krita, as far as I am concerned they have feature parity with Photoshop, so long as you have no interest in ai features
Do you use it? Do you know if it has some of the features I need the most?:
- CMYK with ICC color profile
- Smart objects
- perspective distort
- hair mask refinements
- perspective cloning
- 3D text
- Import 3D objects
- Smart objects
You seem to be a bit more advanced than I am, I have only ever used kritas version of smart objects, & perspective distort, but I don't know about the others you mentioned.
Frankly the open source ai projects for krita are better than Photoshop
The only one I'm aware of requires a GPU with 6Gb of vram, which sadly I do not have, I would very much like a background removal utility that is run locally
The only one I'm aware of requires a GPU with 6Gb of vram, which sadly I do not have, I would very much like a background removal utility that is run locally
so long as you have no interest in ai features
That sounds like a major selling point. I’ll need to check that out.
Winapps is too slow for gpu-heavy apps, like photoshop actually is.
So I went with Gimp 3. It does everything I need. Gimp 2.10 didn't, but the new version, 3, does. Sure it has quirks: e.g. when selecting a layer with bg transparency, it selects the whole layer (including the empty parts) instead of just the parts that aren't empty -- you need to do layers -> alpha to selection to get the contents. Another one: to get transparency when you delete parts of a layer is to add an alpha channel to that layer (otherwise you get a bg color). But if you learn these few quirks, Gimp does everything photoshop does pretty much.
If you have old PSD files that have adjustment layers or smart objects, pass them via Photopea, and export as TIFF. Then load on Gimp3 and move to that for life.
Not great. I even got GPU passthrough working once, but you get weird graphics glitches because it's all being sent over RDP.
I think Cassowary might be better than WinApps, but honestly, at this point, I just gave up on those and just use the VM directly.
Curious if Winboat would work better than winapps.
Winapps do not make passthrough of GPU or there is no hardware acceleration it rendering in software way only basically if u are using even podman or docker or libvirtd in the end it qemu with windows in which u connect by rdp.
About rdp ,
- make sure that OEM scripts was successful executed in windows ,they should appear at C:\oem
- Do not forget to clean certificate of freerdp on host system there mention about it on github wiki of winapps
- Preferable use something like tiny11.iso
Personally I recommend it running through wine. Works good.
Just don't. Use FOSS.
A lot of advance features of Photoshops simply does not exist on any FOSS alternative.
did you try krita?
I'm actually a Photoshop and CSP users that regularly report missing features to Krita and GIMP. Even Krita dev often ask community which featuers they want from CSP. Some example that GIMP and Krita does not have that I remember:
- 3D environment (available on CSP and PS)
- flexible several document views (only on CSP)
- adjustable anchor resize (only on CSP)