I recently figured out a way to make Claude Desktop work on non-persistent VDI. Here's how I did it and everything I figured out along the way. https://thedxt.ca/2026/06/deploy-claude-desktop-on-non-persistent-vdi/

Is excluding the vm_bundles directory a good idea? If the is excluded Claude is going to re-download the VM source and/or rebuilding this potentially causing a large amount of IO or downloads

If you don't have Cowork enabled the vm_bundles will never download. it also depends on the profile management system like if its something like DEM it would be a bad idea to persist that folder. Some of the Claude documentation indicates that vm_bundles is supposed to live in LocalAppData (not the package cache location) but I never saw it go anywhere other than the package cache location or AppData. It's also just the cache for Cowork and seems to download as smaller file initially. you have to kind of read between the lines on this https://claude.com/docs/cowork/3p/data-storage Claude-3p is just Claude running on third party platforms the logic is basically the same of the Claude folder when running on non third party platforms.

Thank you. Got the request today to set this up 👍🏻