I am building a workstation for my daughter, who is now in her second year at The Animation School in Cape Town. Her 3D animation courses are based on Maya, as this is the de facto standard for most animation and game studios in South Africa, is registered with Autodesk and is entitled to a Student Licence. She uses Krita and a Wacom tablet for painting, OpenToonz for 2D animation, Darktable for her photography and Lightworks for video, but has been trying out DaVinci Resolve, all available for Linux. She is interested in Blender but has no time to spend learning Blender too, until she is done with her diploma…
I have settled on a ASRock H370M Pro4 micro ATX motherboard with an Intel Core i5-8400 cpu, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB gpu and 32Gb ram and custom case, which I will build myself from recycled materials including cardboard, wood and distressed metals I forage from the streets to fit the hardware. I use Linux and OSS/libre software in this same spirit (for me it’s a political/ethical discision but is not a consideration for my daughter). This means I have no technical or working experience recently with proprietary software like Maya or the newer versions of Windows.
What I would like to know from someone with practical experience with installing and using Maya as a daily driver is, will I be able to install Maya on Linux with my daughter’s licence, will it work well with/is it stable on this hardware and Linux, as only Quadro cards are certified for Linux, should I/do I really need to stump up the lucre for Windows 10 Pro? Maya is the only real requirement vis a vis proprietary software as my daughter actually prefers/uses mostly OSS software otherwise (my fault as that is all she could use before she had access to her own hardware). Also, is it worth the effort to register on the Autodesk forums to get advice?
Any thoughts/advice on hardware/software would be greatly appreciated!