

I haven’t really had to run a VM for anything but I think Qemu is the main program used by most people for running VMs.
There is also this project I was going to experiment with but I never got around to it. Maybe you could give it a go https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
I think you can if you layer them, right? I run bazzite on one if my machines and I had to do that for something I wanted. Should keep it to a minimum but since this a key piece of your workflow it should be okay