@theDuesentrieb I asked for the highest-spec computer the company would buy me (which turned out to be an Apple MacBook M2). I then promptly installed a QEMU-based emulator and installed Debian Linux into the emulator. The emulated disk is fully encrypted. I allow the VM full use of all CPU cores and 100% of all memory and disk space.
If you do get a Apple computer, I highly recommend you buy UTM from the app store, it is by far the most cost-effective option, and works extremely well with Debian Aarch64. Once you install the qemu-guest-agent package onto Linux, the Linux screen resolution will automatically match the #MacBook, copy-paste works seamlessly between #Linux and #MacOS. Desktop environments like #Cinnamon, #Xfce, #Gnome, and #KDEPlasma all allow you to select #HiDPI scaling which allows Linux to take full advantage of the #Apple “retina” display (it looks beautiful). The one and only drawback is that #QEMU cannot use Apple’s hardware multimedia codecs, so it falls back to software codecs, and the CPU just can’t keep up with things like video conferencing, or often even ordinary 720p video playback. I use Mac OS for only multimedia applications and video conferencing. For everything else, I continue to use Linux.
I recommend the bridge networking adapter so you can have two-way network communications between Linux and MacOS, this allows for file transfer between Mac and Linux via rsync. The trade-off is that every time your Apple computer switches computers networks (e.g. between home and office), you must reset the networking services in Linux. If you choose the NAT network option Linux will always have network access directly via the MacOS interface, but you will not be able to easily transfer files between Mac and Linux.
The keyboard is the hardest thing to get used to, mostly that “super” and “alt” are swapped. Be sure to transpose those keys in the #UTM configuration. It is easy to configure the Apple keyboard to (for example) make caps-lock another control key.
