Thank you vary much, I appreciate the information!
Did you try AD17, or other older AD variants in the linux / windows VMed environment you described with any more success
than the AD20/AD21 failures?
And I heartily agree with your sentiments, it should at least work as well as the cad software
of past decades did on old HW but now running on top of now a vastly more powerful machine even if it's VMed.
I tried running their SW a while back under VirtualBox with a linux host machine and windows guest.
I had similar results of it failing to show the layout at all though the schematic worked.
I didn't get around to trying vmware or a different GPU after failing a few configurations under virtualbox / linux.
At that point I just found an old low specification desktop and dedicated it to CAD though I'd have much preferred
running it in a VM under linux host on top of a single much newer / more well equipped machine.
Perhaps I'll give it a try under my current linux desktop and see if I get lucky with virtualization but
as far as I suspect I'd probably have to install a physically separate GPU and use pcie-passthrough to the VM
to dedicate a whole GPU to the VM instance to have any chance of luck, and that'd be fairly horrible in
a number of ways (one can scarcely even procure a GPU these days with the supply shortage, bad thermals, bad power,
bad airflow, bad driver issues, inflated cost,...). And such configurations tend to be fragile and awkward anyway.
There's no good reason why AD can't play more nicely with VMs even if it means less responsive
graphics and calculations, it'd probably still be good enough to do the job in most cases just as it was
in ~2010 on even less powerful physical hardware of that day.
But my AD desktop is probably not going to keep working into the next years anyway given it's barely suited for W10,
not at all for W11, and various drivers are probably already EOLed.
I thought I'd replace it with a laptop, but now it's just the laptop vs. GPU issue that gives me pause
(and the ever present desktop VM issues for that case).
I have a Dell XPS13 as a motorcycle computer, i.e. it fits easily into a corner
of one of the 2 alu boxes. It runs under Linux Mint with VMware. The virtual
machine is a 1:1 copy of my Win10 CAD machine @ home, just the contents of
a 200G directory. Still fits nicely on the XPS13 SSD.
Everything works, even if it is not a preferred work environment, but:
While VMware complains it cannot provide DirectX 3D, Altium 20 or 21 layout
simply does nothing at all. No complaint, but the layout window simply shows
the screen background. Schematics works. Ever heard of diagnostics?
While I would not expect real time 3D performance, I expect that I can
at least see a simple board. Just like DOS Orcad did 35 years ago on a super-VGA
on this Compaq-286-16. Or at least "SORRY, I'm too dumb" across the screen.
Gerhard