Ah, that's good to know. I wonder why that is. I don't use these programs beyond the odd very simple image manipulation that could be done just as easily in paint, so I have no idea what people want from Photoshop alternative. However, I seem to keep hearing no single open source program does everything from people who are PS power users.
Don't get me started on AutoCAD, and just CAD tools in general... Being more involved on that side, from a dev rather than user perspective, I can't say I think very highly of Autodesk, or the idea of having all these geometry kernels be proprietary, and Autodesk acquiring as many of them as it can. Maths is public, maths research belongs to the public, you can fuck off with gating it.
As for VMs, we are talking about apps that need a relatively good GPU and therefore one would need to do some GPU pass through on their VM to use it properly I believe. Assuming I'm right, that may be more trouble than it's worth compared to a dual boot (also assuming this hasn't gotten much simpler than my somewhat distant memory now)