Hi, I’m an old windows user who have played with linux* a few times, but never commited to it.

I want to dive deeper and I though about installing linux in a VM. Some basic questions:

• Is that a good idea? / Anything I should take into account?
• Is there any preferred VM manager for this? Windows comes with Hyper-V, but I remember reading about how Hyper-V is not ideal (I could be wrong).
• Do different distributions work better or worse on VMs?
• Are there any major differences when using linux in a VM compared to a bare metal installation?

And some not-so-basic ones:

• Is there any [dis]advantage to “Linux VM on Windows” VS “Windows VM on Linux”?
• If I start with “Linux VM on Windows”, would it be possible to swap them in the future? What I mean is:
  • Virtualize the Windows installation so it can be run as a VM.
  • Un-virtualize the Linux VM (with all its contents and configuration) and move it to bare metal.
  • Run Windows VM on linux.

Notes:

• I did a quick search and, although I found multiple articles about the topic, the ones I’ve read just show one way to do it without comparing it to the alternatives.
• I’m aware of WSL(2), but I would like to be able to decouple from Windows in the future.
• EIDT: I tried dual booting in the past. The main problem is that I’m too lazy to reboot every time I want to try something in linux and I end up not using it.

Thanks!

* Mandatory linux = GNU/Linux