I’m trying to avoid moving to Adobe’s subscription program because the old Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 6 work fine for my needs.
However, those apps (and a few others important to me) have issues with any OS after Sierra, which I’m still using, so I’m looking for a way to keep Sierra running those apps on one partition, and install Mojave on another. I’d just boot into Sierra for doing photo work.
I have a 2013 iMac with the Fusion drive, and imagine it’s giving me some benefit for those resource-hungry Adobe apps. Would a Mojave partition take over the Fusion drive, preventing the Sierra partition from using it?
And I suppose I’d have one partition in HFS+ and one in APFS. If I later moved to the Adobe subscription, would it be difficult to move my photo files (DNG and JPG) from HFS to APFS? Or does that happen automatically when you copy to and APFS volume?
So I’m thinking…
If you use VMWare Fusion, you could run Sierra in a virtual machine on Mojave.
I’m not sure if Unity View would work, but that would be cool if it did, and make things pretty seamless. Unity View allows you to use Windows applications without having to see the Windows desktop. Not sure if that applies to macOS as well.
I’m generally agreeing with JohnAtl here. If you had a VM, in theory you should be able to move that VM from machine to machine for the foreseeable future. Multiple partitions would have the potential issue that you’d be unable to install the OS at some point, and you’d be stuck.
Whether or not Unity view is available, it should be trivially easy to share folders between the VM and the main machine.
We are talking about Adobe apps like Photoshop and Lightroom here, so VM with it’s RAM and resource limitation might not be the best idea for performance reason. BUT, it always depends on your needs of course. If you use PS just for some light editing with smaller files say below 100mb, than VM could work. Lightroom on the other hand will put your machine to it’s knees if you have a somewhat large library so VM would be a challenge. There are other apps that don’t require a subscription but you’d have to learn to use them. I’m thinking On1Photo Raw 2019 or Luminar depending on your needs. Like the others have said, I wouldn’t go with a separate partition though even though you could do it. you could also just buy a separate external SSD and boot from that when needed. Adobe still has great value if you use the software regularly and you wouldn’t have to learn a new tool, just saying;-)