Build a port of the ArcGIS desktop clients to run on Operating Systems other than Windows. 10% of desktops are not on Windows. Most high-end technical computing in the Petroleum Exploration industry is done on Linux\Unix OS computers.
Don't forget about mac os
I think the chances of that ever happening are next to nil. Pro is so tight up with the whole Windows and Windows Presentation Foundation thing, which isn't going to be available in a Linux environment anytime soon, if discussions like these are a reliable measure:
Make WPF cross-platform (MacOS and Linux support) · Issue #48 · dotnet/wpf · GitHub
Have you tried using Oracle's free Virtualbox once? I currently run an Ubuntu instance with PostgreSQL 11 in Virtualbox on Windows 10 as host, and access it from Python using the 'pyodbc' package that you can install from the ArcGIS Pro package manager. Works really nicely to create tables and views, that I subsequently access as ArcGIS 'Query Layers' after adding an ObjectID column using the 'Add Incrementing ID Field' geoprocessing tool.
I even use Python multi-threading and record-by-record updates to insert and generalize data in PostGIS. Here's an image of my small test Core i7 server going flat out on all 4 cores / 8 threads generalizing data using Python multi-threading from ArcGIS Pro:

Hi Marco! I have messed with Virtualbox - I do have a separate linux server at home that I have postgres/postgis running on. I use Pro on a Windows laptop to connect to it and try stuff. It does kind of work but postgis support is still, well you can tell Esri is kind of dragging their heels on it. But it is getting better.
At work we have a Cisco 480ML pushing 8x Nvidia Tesla nvme GPUs, running RHEL7; the way we use it is having VMWare running 4x windows instances as a cluster with 2x gpus assigned to each, but we are exploring NVLink/NVSwitch underneath that so we only have to have one VM that ArcGIS Pro can offload jobs to and access the entire range of resources at once.
Hi @RobertGraham,
ArcGIS Desktop is in mature support and will be retired March 1, 2026 so we won’t be considering this idea. We recommend that you migrate to ArcGIS Pro, our fully supported desktop GIS application.
Thank you for taking the time to share your ideas. We truly appreciate your contributions to continuously improving the software to help you do your work and look forward to what ideas you have for ArcGIS Pro.
If you are looking for a way to run ArcGIS Pro on Linux, it was reported to be possible to some degree with WineHQ - ArcGIS Pro 3.4 (no official support).
Community link: ArcGIS Pro for Linux? - Esri Community
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