Why do you need 3d acceleration for using a system? GUIs work perfectly without any 3D acceleration. Are you planing on playong games? If so it is not a good idea in any VM.
I use a minimalist window manager, but I think I am in the minority, even among software engineers that use linux as their primary development environment. This almost works, except web browsers are extremely GPU heavy these days, so JavaScript laden sites (jenkins, amazon, news) often become unusable with more than ~10 tabs.
Anyway, most engineers at work use unity because it is the default, and it is a non-starter without hardware acceleration. We site-licensed vmware, and it seems to work OK.
The last time I checked, the second most common choice is fvwm. It sorta works out of the box and isn't unity. Also, it can run on the big server VM's, unlike unity (there is no 3d acceleration in the server kvm instances...)
Another common choice is to do everything via console, productivity be damned. (There are some highly productive console users, but they tend to put linux on their laptops on day one anyway)
Wow, Unity on a VM? I haven't seen that, actually I haven't seen any Linux user in my current and previous employers that would start any X apps on a VM.
Why start a browser there? Is it for testing the web pages in different environments? If not, then wouldn't it be more reasonable to start it on a bare metal (the machine you connect to the VM)?
But it might be my bias, I'm one of those that install Linux on a company laptop on day one :) so I'm most efficient in the console.
Anyway, most engineers at work use unity because it is the default, and it is a non-starter without hardware acceleration. We site-licensed vmware, and it seems to work OK.
The last time I checked, the second most common choice is fvwm. It sorta works out of the box and isn't unity. Also, it can run on the big server VM's, unlike unity (there is no 3d acceleration in the server kvm instances...)
Another common choice is to do everything via console, productivity be damned. (There are some highly productive console users, but they tend to put linux on their laptops on day one anyway)