Hi Tildes community,
I'm seeking your suggestions for spinning up Windows virtual desktop.
Allow me to set the context...
My offspring is in second semester of their first year of university, and needs to use Adobe Photoshop for one of their classes this semester. They don't use a regular laptop, and have been doing quite well at uni. with their beefy Ipad. While they have used photoshop so far on their ipad, there are some growing pains. Of course, they have access to super beefy desktop Apple Macs at their school's computer lab, but its a pain to get usage of them for a few reasons. At home, all my machines are linux except for my partner's which is an old clunker Windows laptop - which i am in progress of migrating themn away from that Windows machine towards linux laptop...Hence, I don't really have a solid, modern enough machine for my offspring to load Photoshop onto.

Then, I thought, hey, maybe i can spin up some Windows virtual desktop somewhere for my offspring to use photoshop on...Its only needed for about 10 or 12 weeks remaining this semester...and they only need to use it once per week for each week's assignments. I feel like as long as the virtual windows machine is beefy enough to suppoort photoshop workloads, it can get them through the semester...and then in summer i can decide if I need to buy them an actual laptop (like an Apple laptop, etc.).

So, may i ask of you dear Tildes community members...Does my approach make sense (of trying to use a windows virt. desktop)? And, if so, are there any recommendations for which provider to use, and how to spin these up? Like, should i try something via AWS or Google Cloud or Azure? Or, should i not even consider this virtual windows approach? I'm open to hearing any/a ll recommendations. If you have links to share for me to research, or if you actually wrote your own blog post on similar topic for example, i'd love to hear it! Thanks in advance!!

I have an M1 MacBook Air. I use UTM to run a Debian 11 virtual machine.

After the initial setup, updating and upgrading, installing Firefox and a few small programs, (I almost called them apps, d'oh), the Debian.utm file size was about 6GB. Now, less than a month later, it's almost 9GB.

The VM size increases after each use. I haven't downloaded or installed anything close to 3GB worth. I have downloaded files, then put them into the trash and emptied the trash, could the trash not be emptying properly?

I have run ncdu, but nothing stands out. When I drill down into /usr and into each large folder, no sub folder is larger than a few 100MB. I can't see any big files lurking.

I've googled using many search terms, but I can't get past results that are about how to increase the size of a VM that is running out of room.

Thanks very much for reading this, any ideas?

Hi, hope this is the right place for this question. I'd like to learn Autodesk Fusion 360, but all of my devices are running either Ubuntu or ChromeOS. I've tried to get F360 running on my ubuntu desktop with both Wine and Lutris but I haven't had success. There is also a web application for F360 but it is feature limited.

It seems like the only way to get this program running is to use a virtual machine, but I don't have much experience in this area. Do I need to buy a windows license and set up my own VM or is there a service where I can rent time on a preconfigured VM somewhere?

Thanks for reading, hope to hear your suggestions.

I have a large VirtualBox VM on an external HDD. The HDD fails the S.M.A.R.T. test. The VM still works fine, but any regular attempt to copy the VM files over to a healthy drive fails ... there is clearly already something corrupt in the VM's virtual HDD, although it is not (apparently? yet?) affecting the functionality of the actual VM.

Any suggestions on how to save the VM? Linux Mint Guest OS, Pop_OS (Ubuntu) Host. The VM is nearly 800 GB. Both regular copy and rsync fail.

Thanks,
Eric

PS: (and perhaps I should have led with this, but...) is it okay to ask these kinds of specific, technical, "help me with my tech-stuff" questions here on Tildes?

Update to the update ... moved update info into a comment ... will keep my progress updated in that primary comment.

Danke, y gracias to all

Right now I dual boot windows 10 and fedora, windows for gaming, fedora for everything else. I'm considering running linux as my only native operating system, and running windows in a virtual machine for gaming. This will be more convenient than restarting my pc every time I want to play a game, and I'll feel better about having windows sandboxed in a VM than running natively on my computer.

To get gaming performance out of a virtual machine, I'm planning to have two gpus. One for linux to use, and one reserved exclusively for the virtual machine.

Have any of you set up a computer like this before? What was your experience like? How was the performance?