Same reason here, our IT department only supports windows and I've been mostly using VBox to work in linux at work for the past 3 years without any incident whatsoever. The clipboard, mouse and keyboard sharing are really fantastic. It really makes you forget this is a guest OS.

i've tried doing the same but the performance hit is unfortunately too big for me to find it acceptable. silly policies.

You should try it in Hyper-V. GPU-accelerated desktops are still no good, but everything else performs really well.

from what i understand it, hyper-v is only supported by a couple of distros and even then, the performance gains are not that noticable. definitely worth looking into none the less, thanks.