Here's a fun fact not noted in the article: Temporary files in sqlite are named etilqs_something in order to prevent people from contacting the sqlite developers for support when other applications (specifically, McAfee) have decided dump and not prune temp files.
Source: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/95f6df5b8d55e67d1e34d2bff217305a2f21b1fb/src/os.h#L57
Here's my commentary on the options you listed in the image:
Anaconda: They changed the licensing so that it's not really fully FOSS, as the repos have restrictions on them. There are also other issues like this dark pattern of a download page.
But, forgetting about the licensing or problematic company practices: The software itself is trash. Worst thing I've ever used. It's sooooo slow to install packages when it's doing the "solver" thing. You can use something faster like mamba or miniconda, but then you still have to deal with package availability being poor, as the anaconda repos don't have everything, and much of what they have is often too old.
Docker desktop: It's proprietary. I mean you can use it, but you seem to be interested in open source stuff. Also see caveats to podman desktop below.
Podman Desktop: Technically this will work. But podman desktop is really designed more for development of containerized applications, rather than developing in containers.
Nix: Nix doesn't work on Windows, so you would have to require WSL or something like that.
Fedora VM: I recommend enlightenment as a desktop environment. Very small, but also modern and clean looking. You'll have to configure it to be a bit more similar to windows, but it's a lot more intuitive to use than i3.
There are some other caveats to your environment. "The right .Net Sdks version" — however, the best extensions for C# development are proprietary and cannot be freely used in the fully FOSS versions of vscode.
Yeah, don't do this. I agree with @utopiah@lemmy.ml, work with them, rather than forcing them to work with you. Collaboration goes both ways.
Another recommendation I have is to just see how people in a similar circumstance do what you do. There are plenty of people who do software and game development on twitch, and you can just go on their streams and ask how they collaborate. One method I saw is using trello, a task management software, and artists would upload models there as deliverables. They already have their own workflow, which they probably work efficiently with. And it's not really the job of an artist to integrate models and art into the game, that's the programmers job.