Comment by walkabout

There’s one major benefit to separating your gaming and work machines, if you aren’t also using a lot of graphics horsepower for work[0]: NVidia and AMD graphics cards tend to ~double major problems on a machine (or halve system stability, to put it another way). This was even true of Macs, back when they were on x86.

Now, this won’t help if you play a lot of new games at launch (and aren’t ok playing them on a console instead of PC) or lots of multiplayer games with heavy-handed anti-cheat, but otherwise, Linux as a gaming OS has become pretty damn viable lately. Windows hasn’t been for anything but gaming for me since somewhere around the turn of the millennium, and I’ve just finally been able to ditch it completely. Which is really nice.

What I’m getting at is all-Linux (if you have more tolerance for Linux on the Desktop jank than I do) or Mac-for-work, Linux-for-play are now both non-terrible combos for having gaming available, and unless you need Nvidia or AMD graphics on your work machine (in which case, sure, may as well share that hardware for both roles), there are real benefits to work-system stability you can get by separating those.

(I do agree with you that running Linux under virtualization on either Windows or Mac is the only non-crazy-making and/or non-professionally-embarrassing way to work in Linux on a laptop, and I write that as someone who did run Linux on a laptop as my primary serious OS for most of a decade)

[0] nb. depending on what “a lot” means, Apple Silicon with a lot of system memory might still be a really good option.