I wrote a guide, that could be useful for anyone but I mostly had college undergrads in mind, to get an affordable GPU droplet and then use CLion's SSH support to develop as if they were on a local machine.

I'm loving Paperspace droplets and definitely find the CLion setup I have to make it a joy to work with.

Maybe in time I'll buy my own nvidia GPU but VMs with direct hardware passthrough are truly a game changer for anyone learning about CUDA programming.