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2) may be in some months inflating the VM to be my operating system instead of windows.
Then use wsl2 instead of any other VM type.
Not really, ws2 is Windows running Linux rather that a Linux install. If Nicole wants to evualate Linux as a prefered OS, wsl2 hides quite a lot.
Nicole, your choice of a Linux distribution is a very very personal one. You can go for a cutting edge distro that has ever thing new, probably a smaller market penetration and a smaller team behind it. You get all the new stuff but must accept a few problems along the way. Or a conservative one that might do a lot more testing, has a big team, a big user base but, obviously, moves very slowly.
My view is that a big team and a big user base means most problems you encounter have already been discovered by someone else and fixes are documented. So, I use Debian and I manually install those few things (like Lazarus and FPC) that I want leading edge.
Benny likes PCLinux, I use it as one of my test platforms, looks great, it works well, certainly has all the new stuff. But, IMHO is a bit of a trap, its quite idiosyncratic in how it does stuff. For example, it uses (what it calls) apt to manage packages but those packages are RPMs ! (That is merging the two main package management systems.) But, frustratingly, it does only a small part of what the apt system can do. It sort of defeats one major win for Linux, how easy it is to replace your version of Linux, if you move to anything other than PCLinux and you need to learn new package management skills.
What every distro you use, please consider building your own FPC and Lazarus, its easy and a great test of a new OS.
Davo