Actually I think (for me at least; also a web dev that does unix based stuff but also needs photoshop), the lower-friction route is to run Windows as the native

Actually I think (for me at least; also a web dev that does unix based stuff but also needs photoshop), the lower-friction route is to run Windows as the native OS, and virtualbox the linux install. (I'm also these days of the opinion that this is actually a better solution than cygwin) Basically the unix bits are (far) less resource hungry than Photoshop...