Hi!

I have used autocad since way back in the text entry box days. I have used linux for the same period of time and have used two dozen different cad packages many free/libre and a fair amount closed and for pay.

If your school is teaching you how to use autocad, drown your principles and use autocad.

The goal of going to school is to learn and you will have the easiest time understanding the lesson if you’re using the tool they are teaching you with.

There is no value to making it harder on yourself.

As other replies have stated: file support is gonna be hit or miss and when you start doing actual design work people are gonna expect you to be able to open their unique dwgs that have geometry breaking errors on everything but honest to god autocad.

You might be able to get away with web or vdi or a vm, but my honest advice having used all of those in the past is to bite the bullet and dual boot or maintain a windows or mac system.

You dont wanna find out that you’re beyond what remote, web or vm setups can do when it’s midnight the day before something is due. Just be normal.

First thing you should check is if the school offers VDI - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

My college has VDI, where you can access a GPU accelerated Windows machine from your browser, preinstalled with tools like Autocad, Photoshop, and other stuff.

If your school doesn’t, then you should look at options like VM’s. The problem, however, is that CAD and a lot of other software is GPU intensive, and simply using it in a VM might be too slow for practical usage.

unfortunately dwg files are a blind spot on linux. there are projects like qcad and librecad that have experimental dwg support (behind a paywall for qcad) but they require you to learn a whole new set of tools because workflow is entirely different for these.

i don’t have experience with the web version, it might be enough for files with fewer elements but your best would be to use a vm for immediate future.

alternatively, you can draft your work in 3d and export your drawings from these files. for architectural work there is a great addon for blender called bonsaibim, for mechanical work there is freecad (it also has a workbench called bim workbench for architecture) and for circuit design there is kicad.