I have to pitch in and recommend Orb Stack[1] for virtualization here. If you need WSL-style, terminal-only Linux VMS or want Docker without the bloat of Docker desktop, it's the perfect tool. If you go with Alpine as your distro, the whole thing takes under 200mb of disk space, and less RAM and CPU than most Electron apps when idle. It can do most things that WSL can do, Finder integration, lightning-fast, extremely easy installation, VS Code integration, running Mac commands from Linux and vice versa, effortless file sharing and network connections between the host and guests, fully terminal-based management, out-of-the-box integration with things like "open" and "pbcopy", VPN / proxy detection and autoconfiguration, it can even use Rosetta instead of Qemu for running Intel binaries, which makes them faster than on quite a few Intel laptops.

I'm not affiliated with the company, just a very happy user.

[1] https://orbstack.dev/