Yesterday PC that handles 3d printing and printing prep in my workshop fried. At this point I’m thinking about setting up a new workstation - but with Linux this time , running a VM with Windows for those apps that I can’t get on Linux. Also the idea is to make it remotely accessible to other PCs in the local network.
But the question is how to set it up so the experience is good (or whether it makes sense at all 
) - which VM package would be best and which remote desktop.
I’m leaning towards Vmware for the VM part as I need a bit of 3d graphics power.
I’m quite lost when it comes to remote desktop. Previously I had a pure Windows machine for those tasks and it was accessed by Linux clients using FreeRDP. Tried VNC but the experience was much worse - framerate was really choppy. I don’t know whether that would be the case when using vnc to connect 2 linux machines, or windows to linux host connection (sadly 2 of the workstation have to stay on Windows). Also the question comes whether it makes sense to use remote desktop to access Linux machine that runs VM with Windows or whether remote desktop on both Linux host and Windows in VM would be better ?
As for why I’m looking to set it up this way - if the PC that fried run Linux I could simply remove hdd , put it in other workstation and keep running within minutes. With Windows that’s not an option (unless you have identical workstation you could put the hdd to). And that’s a major pain - especially considering I now have to contact 3d printer manufacturers to “let me” activate their software on new machine (like 3d printer was enough as a “key protection” ). This means my workshop is stuck for a couple of days.
Thus setting up a Linux machine and VM (plus proper RAID just in case, rsync etc) seems like a solution to prevent such issue in the future.
Let me know your thoughts on the matter (sorry for the lengthy post btw) - would love to hear from someone more experienced in the matter 
.