I mean, if you need an all-up system and you’re stuck on windows… virtualbox still works great afaik. You’ll probably need to fiddle with settings to get stuff like PCIe passthrough working for GPGPU workloads, but afaik it’s quite doable. Sure, there’s a bit of slowdown, but if IT straight up doesn’t let you use another OS on the bare metal… that’s probably the best you’re gonna be able to do.
Or, if you’re sick of the perf hit you get running docker crap on non-linux hosts, you can pick up a used SFF/USFF box from eBay and set that up as a remote docker host for executing stuff there. You might also have to set up your “offload box” to tunnel through your work machine if your projects are hitting internally hosted repos and resources, but you can get it to work if you fool around with it enough.
This is consistent with the “Linux is for backend services and command line” mentality. For me those are nice and important, but I prefer the Linux desktop experience, so those options are of no solace. The VM is ultimately constrained on what it can do UI wise.
I flip the relationship the other way around. Linux on bare metal, Windows in a VM. For people needing windows games, this would be a non starter, however I’ve got enough games between Linux native, emulators, and proton with steam. Windows as a separate box would be my strategy if needed.
I mean, if you need an all-up system and you’re stuck on windows… virtualbox still works great afaik. You’ll probably need to fiddle with settings to get stuff like PCIe passthrough working for GPGPU workloads, but afaik it’s quite doable. Sure, there’s a bit of slowdown, but if IT straight up doesn’t let you use another OS on the bare metal… that’s probably the best you’re gonna be able to do.
Or, if you’re sick of the perf hit you get running docker crap on non-linux hosts, you can pick up a used SFF/USFF box from eBay and set that up as a remote docker host for executing stuff there. You might also have to set up your “offload box” to tunnel through your work machine if your projects are hitting internally hosted repos and resources, but you can get it to work if you fool around with it enough.
This is consistent with the “Linux is for backend services and command line” mentality. For me those are nice and important, but I prefer the Linux desktop experience, so those options are of no solace. The VM is ultimately constrained on what it can do UI wise.
I flip the relationship the other way around. Linux on bare metal, Windows in a VM. For people needing windows games, this would be a non starter, however I’ve got enough games between Linux native, emulators, and proton with steam. Windows as a separate box would be my strategy if needed.