You got it.
> Performance is pretty reasonable? APFS works fine in this setup?
Works well enough for my use cases. It's certainly less slow and fragile than running Linux in a VM via macOS.
APFS works fine in the VM, but I use HFS+ just because there are more mature tools to poke at HFS+ images than APFS, right now. The APFS FUSE drivers work well and support reading and writing[1]. There's a closed source driver that supports writing and encryption, though[2].
> No gotchas with drive encryption? ... actually, if your machine does use drive encryption, which is doing it, linux or mac? I don't know enough about mac hardware to know if there is some mac boot environment that handles encryption and then hands off to the OS (be it macos or linux).
I don't use T2 disk encryption, I just let Linux handle partition encryption. Apparently there's support here[3] for it, though.
[1] https://github.com/sgan81/apfs-fuse
[2] https://www.paragon-software.com/us/business/apfs-linux/
Performance is pretty reasonable? APFS works fine in this setup? No gotchas with drive encryption? ... actually, if your machine does use drive encryption, which is doing it, linux or mac? I don't know enough about mac hardware to know if there is some mac boot environment that handles encryption and then hands off to the OS (be it macos or linux).