Title basically.
One of my windows computers, which happens to be the one I happen to do the most CAD work on, can’t upgrade to windows 11 due to having an Ivy Bridge era Xenon (it’s an E5-1680 v2 for the curious, older used workstations are fantastic bang for the buck computers).
Switching to Linux on this computer has been in the cards for a while, but I hadn’t been in a hurry to do it. Looks like my hand might be getting forced…
Fusion360 has been rated Silver on WINE (windows compatability tool) so you have a decent shot of running it. Silver means “couple of minor bugs, might need tweaks to run but runs well”.
In Linux we have FreeCAD but if you’re heavily dependent on Fusion360 I’d recommend trying a Virtual Windows Machine, Bottles, Lutris, Steam Proton, the installation script posted here and so on.
If you have space for two drives on your computer then worst case you could bypass the windows whatever and have two different OSs.
This, maybe with something with good wine/gpu compatibility like CachyOs. And if it fails there are ways to install windows 11 on IvyBridge