I'm a software engineer and you'd have to pry Visual Studio out of my cold dead hands, it's the reason why I deal with all the nonsense of using Windows.
I think they must mean legacy visual studio, rather than VSCode.
VSCode is of course very portable. It also seems to be Microsoft’s (successful) attempt to get everybody to use a reasonable Linux-style workfow. If you look at it as a text editor and terminal in a tiling window manager, it suddenly makes sense that it became so popular.
There is nothing legacy about Visual Studio. There is simply no equivalent of its debugging and profiling capabilities in C++ and C# especially in graphics / game development. No such equivalent exist in Unix world including macOS. They set the bar.
If you're referring to Visual Studio, then Visual Studio Community[0] is free (for individuals and "non-enterprise organizations") and is equivalent to Visual Studio Professional.
To be fair this is adobe's fault. The only reason it isn't available on linux is because adobe goes to great technical and legal lengths to ensure it can't be. A VM with seamless windowing isn't a bad solution for running that kind of forcewear, compromising the whole host OS seems excessive.
Blaming doesn't fix anything. The real point here is that it's a political issue and the open source community is too infantile for politics so they keep lying to themselves instead.
I really want to try VFIO and ditch my windows install completely but I'm worried about anti cheats. Nice to hear there are steps you can take...
You have experience with this? If so, just wondering...are there linux distributions to avoid for VFIO? I'm between arch and NixOS, nothing too outside of the mainstream.
It's definitely worth a whirl! Some anti-cheats are more effective at catching this than others.
I was using this as my method of 'Gaming on Linux' until Proton became a thing.
Lots of experience, indeed, though my memory hasn't aged particularly well. I even had SLi working with two RTX2080s! Hacked drivers and EFIGuard to bypass security things
Valorant was the one game I couldn't really manage.
Perhaps with more determination, but I lost interest rather quickly. Not that into the game and Proton really hurt my VFIO involvement; the timing was unfortunate.
There are some rote edits to the libvirt XML I can't recall. Both to get the nvidia driver to work (if applicable, look for 'code 43'), and to hide the VM state for anti-cheats.
You'll generally be well served by your distribution of choice with modern kernels and QEMU/libvirt.
I don't know Nix well, but from what I gather, you get to pick a lot... so it shouldn't be a problem. Arch is Arch, it'll be fine being so new!
Creative Cloud has a web version of Photoshop[1] supposedly and then there's Office 365, which has been around for a good long while now. I suppose one could use those if need be.
"don't count" as far as Adobe and Microsoft are concerned, yes. You can't blame the people that spend a lot of their free time trying to bring free software to a free platform for not coming up with something that can act as well as Photoshop or Word and fit in with their ecosystems well given the way those companies try to lock things down.
I'm a software engineer and you'd have to pry Visual Studio out of my cold dead hands, it's the reason why I deal with all the nonsense of using Windows.