Can anyone give recommendations on what to do if you have to run Autodesk products (Revit. Autocad) for work? No, I can't swap them for open source alternatives such as FreeCAD as Im working with large international projects. Should I dual boot? Virtual machine inside Linux?
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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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
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.
Thanks. I am a freelancer but I depend on the platforms my clients work with.
In order of priority:
- Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
- Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.
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.
I was thinking this too. Might get a second desktop and set that up
I'm a freelancer and a lot of my work apps require Windows or Mac. However, I remote into my company's work machines, but the remote client doesn't work in Linux so I have a lowered speced machine just for work, and my personal rig is much more powerful and running linux.
Even if I was freelancing completely with my own machine, I would prefer to have two seperate machines.
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 :)
Winboat, for when you absolutely have to use something Windows based on your Linux machine.
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