I run full multiple Ubuntu desktop VMs on Parallels on a M1 MacBook Air. You can use Docker for server installs, sure, but QEMU also works great on Macs and with Rosetta you can even get pretty damn close to native x86 execution speeds.
they run through virtualization which is clunky to interface with across boundaries and introduces overhead. I also don't think it has any hardware acceleration for things that would benefit from using the gpu.
