Hello there! I posted a while back some Godot games I’ve been working on, and I ended up making a few of those and putting them on Itch. Well, I managed to get a job at a studio working in Unreal Engine 5 due to these projects (yes, I’m not kidding, I got a job at a respectable studio with just Godot, it’s possible), and I’ve been working for almost a year now there. I do a lot of WFH, and I need to use Windows not just because of Unreal but because a lot of other tools are used that are windows specific and I’d be kind of dead in the water if something goes wrong and I’m the only one running this on Linux. The main reason I do this is that I find that I use Linux (and therefore my PC) very little outside of work, and having to switch back and forth between Windows and Linux via dual boot just makes me never switch to Linux and therefore never work on my own projects.
My question is, could I wet up a Windows Virtual machine with proper GPU passthrough needed for Unreal on Linux? I know some of this stuff is motherboard and GPU dependent, I have a MSI B450 Tomahawk Max and an MSI Gaming Radeon 6600XT.
Short answer, yes you can, it will take some work and depends on your motherboard though. But you would also be amazed at how many tools already exist for Linux just with a different name. Unreal development is more than possible:
As for asset tools most are written in Python and .NET Core these days, this exist on Linux and Wine is also surprisingly competent today. Might not be ideal by should be pretty good. Public tools tend to have a Linux alternative, too, and sometimes a straight port.
There are also benefits from running a couple devs on Linux, like for instance proper support for Proton and also native runtimes.
I do understand your concerns re something getting borked though, I would ask your manager if you could get a 5700G as a low end / Steam deck development station. It is the closest thing available until Strix point and will only set the company back around $1k. For a 5700G + 64GB RAM + 4 TB storage. Add in an RTX 3060 or perhaps even a 7700 XT and you have a decent midrange machine where you can develop in Linux while leaving your win PC untouched, and have a lower power machine just to run sanity checks on the game with regards to system usage.
A rough sketch of that system is something like this: