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KVM via virt-manager (GUI front-end for QEMU)

The most meme-ish since you’re trying a meme

It really doesnt matter much. They will both give you a good idea of what arch is like

In my experience, there are no problems with either VirtualBox or VMware when it comes to Arch. Personally, I mainly use VirtualBox.

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Doesn’t matter that much. Personally I’d just go with virtualbox because it’s open source.

Seems like HyperV is the obvious answer, but last I knew that was a Windows Pro and up feature. Virtual Box is a fine tool as an alternative.

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I think both are usually fairly well supported, but VirtualBox being open-source it’s probably got slightly better drivers for desktop use although I’m sure VMware has it pretty well covered as well.

Ultimately it’s not going to affect the experience much. All Linux distros are going to perform comparably in a VM as long as the appropriate drivers are in use.

What you look for in a distro is more like the general experience of using it: does it have the packages you need, do you like the package manager and how the packages are structured, do you like how it sets up services. Especially for a more DIY distro like Arch, by the time you’ve set up your desktop environment and software you’ll probably have a good feel of how the distro works already. With Arch in particular you won’t be looking at any sort of out of the box experience (ie. does it install and support your hardware easily out of the box post-install) like you would if you were comparing Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint/SUSE/Manjaro.

If you’re not familiar with it, windows now has native support to run Linux via the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). It can integrate pretty well into your environment as well, like pushing vscode applications to run in the Subsystem. It apparently supports gui as well although I haven’t tried setting that up myself.