I could do what you said, but the apps are nicer than Linux ones. But I still care about data portability (it's trivial to export data in all the app I use) so it's more a want, not a need.

MacOS was the host and it was immediate boot into Debian VM and it was my main machine I used to dev every day.

Pros and cons: I switched to parallels vm software from virtualbox because it just seemed to run a LOT smoother which meant the machine ran dramatically cooler. I think this was due to the graphics driver - higher frame rates and no display glitches

I’m not a gamer but very occasionally I like to play older strategy games - this I did outside the Linux vm, since high performance graphics wasn’t good inside the vm as one would expect.

I allocated like 90% of the system RAM (machine was an Intel Mac with 64GB of ram) to the vm

Once inside the booted machine running full screen it felt native, I would forget I was in a vm

Bridged networking so other machines on my lan can ssh in,

Any other questions you have let me know!

All packages and dependencies are installed under /opt/.

The consistent pathing is the only sane way to manage tooling.