Talking about emulation/VMs, I have recently played with multipass (from canonical) to run ubuntu VMs on my Apple M1. It works like a charm! In the past I have tried VMware and Vagrant, and while they somehow work, I’m always running into issues. More recently I tried qemu, and I spent many days trying to figure out the correct set of command line parameters to run linux.
The bad thing about multipass is that it only runs Ubuntu VMs. The good thing (besides working out of the box) is that mutipass uses qemu behind the curtains, and as part of the logs multipass spits out, one can see the complete set of command line parameters that was used to spin up the VM (so that can be used as a blueprint to run other VMs besides Ubuntu)