CAD programs, e.g. SolidWorks, Alibre, SketchUp, eDrawings, Fusion 360? Windows.
CAM programs, e.g. BobCAM, MeshCAM, MasterCAM? Windows.
Office? Windows (LibreOffice is not a functional replacement - you can’t risk having documents being sent to clients looking bad).
FileMaker, Act! Pro, other desktop databases? Windows.
Router control software, e.g. Mach3, Mach4, UCCNC? Windows.
Adobe anything (GIMP is worse than a joke)? Or, if you don’t like Adobe, Affinity? Windows.
No shortage of Windows and Mac only programs in a business. Other than MasterCAM, my family uses or has used every piece of software I just listed in our small business. Linux is not an option; only for home hobbyist use, maybe. If you could get by with a Chromebook, Linux will work for you, otherwise it probably won’t. (This might sound like a slam, but remember Steam also runs on Chromebooks now.)
So I have some terrible news for you about what happens if your client has an older version of Office than you do...
> Office? Windows (LibreOffice is not a functional replacement - you can’t risk having documents being sent to clients looking bad).
What kind of documents are you sending to clients? In my experience I would only share PDFs 99% of the time. So is your concern that the PDF will look unprofessional or that you need to send .docx or .xlsx or .pptx files to clients?
They run on mac
I have a barebones 'just installed' win10 image that I use to clone a new VM for each new app I add. Solidworks, NX, Cadence, Altium and ISE all work fine with no problems because of 3d acceleration or such.
Admitably my impetus for this was conflicting FlexLM emulators cough, but there's no reason it can't work just as a way of keeping things organised and clean on a host OS that isn't windows.
Emphatically, no. Running CAM, or CAD software, in a VM, is almost unusably slow with any large models. I’ve tried. It’s not fun to zoom through a large model at 5 FPS. You need to have GPU passthrough, and even though you can make that work, it’s very risky (hardly a stable sane thing to build a business on), and you’re just running Windows again, but worse. We need GPUs in Windows already (primarily NVIDIA) just to keep the CAD from being too slow, and to keep our rendering options open.
Even if it worked brilliantly in a VM (which it doesn’t), why would I double my operating systems and run them simultaneously? That’s just begging for compatibility issues, frustration, and defeats the point of avoiding Windows entirely. Any benefits for avoiding Windows are almost completely negated.
I would consider Wine instead, or Proton. It may work really well with some software, but may have trouble with other software.
