Are you saying you're using a debian VM on your Mac as a daily driver? Running i3wm and Firefox and ultimately living in Linux, but on your Mac? Does that mean you never have to use MacOS much (beside upgrading the host mac OS, and launching the VM right after boot)? If that's your setup I would love to hear more about it, the pros and the cons.
This was exactly my setup for like 4 years a few years ago.
MacOS was the host and it was immediate boot into Debian VM and it was my main machine I used to dev every day.
Pros and cons: I switched to parallels vm software from virtualbox because it just seemed to run a LOT smoother which meant the machine ran dramatically cooler. I think this was due to the graphics driver - higher frame rates and no display glitches
I’m not a gamer but very occasionally I like to play older strategy games - this I did outside the Linux vm, since high performance graphics wasn’t good inside the vm as one would expect.
I allocated like 90% of the system RAM (machine was an Intel Mac with 64GB of ram) to the vm
Once inside the booted machine running full screen it felt native, I would forget I was in a vm
Bridged networking so other machines on my lan can ssh in,
It's not my setup and it's fairly recent. I love some of the Mac software (Bear, Things, Dash, Doppler) and the Mac hardware. But dealing with project dependencies and tooling is a pain on every OS I've been. SO I bought Parallels (issues with graphic in UTM), configured a base OS, and clone it for each project. So personal workflows are still macOS-centric, but dev workflow is Linux.
I could do what you said, but the apps are nicer than Linux ones. But I still care about data portability (it's trivial to export data in all the app I use) so it's more a want, not a need.
