The VM performance hit is far too hard to recommend it for actually running applications. I'll use it to dev for another system (e.g. a Python backend for a web app) but I would not spin up a VM to e.g. compile LibreOffice or -shudder- actually run LibreOffice.
Would it really be an issue to run LibreOffice in a VM on a modern machine? Back in the bad old days of ten years ago, I used to run a Windows 7 VM on my Ubuntu laptop of RAM to watch Netflix. It was pretty tight with 2GB of RAM, but it worked fine.
