RHEL Workstation on P1 Gen 5 - Basic Questions

[H-Atkinson]

So... Windows has finally become annoying enough that it has convinced me to jump ship to Linux in the near future. I'm preparing to make that move, and had a few (admittedly uninformed) questions about it. I do a lot of CAD work, need my nVidia GPU to behave, and would like something stable, so RHEL workstation seemed the obvious choice.

Has anyone put RHEL workstation on a modern Thinkpad with an nVidia card, and if so, anything noteworthy about the process? I haven't touched Linux beyond the Juniper CLI in a few years, so I'm not exactly up to speed.

Beyond that, is anyone using a Windows VM or a compatibility layer to get Windows software (I'm namely looking at Solidworks, Creo, Inventor, and AutoCAD) working? I'm still trying to figure out my best option there, but again, GPU is a must.

Thanks for any insight!

[muirrum]

I can't say anything about RHEL Workstation specifically, but for virtualizing Windows I generally like either Oracle's VirtualBox if you want to get up and running quickly. Last I checked, both Virtualbox and libvirtd have decent support for PCIe passthrough, which should get your GPU sent through to the VM.