Maybe just skill issue, but I was using it for developing a large rust project. Compilation time was way worse than native and memory was a problem since I was allocating half of total to the vm and I only had 16 gb.
Also the network would cut out and I would have to restart the vm periodically.
Just using a linux laptop is way better but then I don’t have a nice touchpad, excellent battery life etc.
Even better is a Mac laptop with a desktop/cloud machine under your desk you can SSH into, which is what I personally do personally. Fast fiber connection with IPv6 and/or Wireguard helps. If you're using VSCode and Zed both have remote editing function over SSH too.
Everything has trade-offs. The baseline in this subthread was not bare metal Linux but WSL, which has the same exact issues. It might not give you the full RAM, but it should be smooth and the network should work.
I'd compare WSL to my older Intel MBP's setup, a VirtualBox VM. Both are subject to the RAM splitting and lacking GPU support, but at least things are simple and predictable on the CPU side, no emulation.
There's no "emulation" unless you specifically need to run x86 code. If your baseline is VirtualBox x86 on x86, the direct comparison, arm64 virtualized Linux experience on M1, is better than VirtualBox for sure.
Also the network would cut out and I would have to restart the vm periodically.
Just using a linux laptop is way better but then I don’t have a nice touchpad, excellent battery life etc.