Technology

Controversial take:

If Autodesk products is how you make your money - Just use the OS your work provides you. Unless you're a freelancer, of which that's your work computer, and lock everything else down.

Work computer is not my problem. Nor am I putting anything personal on there. Microsoft wants to mine my company's info, let those two deal with that shit.

In order of priority:

1. Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
2. Try installing/running it via Bottles (a veeeery easy to use Wine frontend, hiding lots of wine complexity). Wine allows running most windows programs directly on Linux, with almost zero performance overhead.
3. Try installing/running it via winboat (basically WSL in reverse - a well-integrated Windows VM or container running on Linux so you can run pesky Windows-only programs with it) (haven't used it myself yet)
4. Use a regular full Windows VM on Linux (likely less well integrated and more resource intensive than #3, but maybe even more compatible). Set up a shared folder between host and VM for easy file transfers.
5. Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.

I feel most replies have never used those products and are recommending options which just don't work well enough imo. I have a VM for Fusion 360, but it's really not fast enough for day to day use. Things like wine just don't work. You're gonna have to suck it up and either dual boot, or run a VM with GPU passthrough to get hardware acceleration in your VM.

Maybe you can split your GPU for a VM but I haven't figured that out yet

Edit: if you do dualboot, you can put all your stuff on a separate partition (documents, downloads etc) and share that between the systems so you always have access to your stuff

Dual boot is an option, but I would go with 2 machines, one with Windows with only the Autodesk products and the other with Linux and all the other software.

Winboat, for when you absolutely have to use something Windows based on your Linux machine.

If you must use windows but hate using it, have a vm inside linux dockur/windows: Windows inside a Docker container.. But it is not the smoothest windows experience (it really is for backup when you really need windows): it is not as fast as directly booted windows and apps that can't run in a vm won't run here. If this does not work for you, then dual boot or just use windows if necessary!

The first option fits me well fyi :)

They've invested lots of money in AI systems and found out that people do not want to use them, so if they make them unavoidable and force people to use it.

Capitalism does that sometimes.