UTM is great, and once snapshot capability is added [1] it will become my default recommendation for sure. Until then sticking with Parallels. NOTE: An unofficial snapshot manager exists [2].
As someone who would always practice the habit of doing development within VMs as opposed to my actual system for a number of reasons, I tried UTM and played with it for a long time to host ARM64 Linux VMs on my M1 Macbook Pro, however the file sharing issues plagued me - with the most common problem being, having my shared folders disappear suddenly from the guest VMs, and having to do workarounds to get them back, quite often. Next, I tried VMWare Fusion, but it has the same problem. After that I tried Parallels, which seemed too expensive, so I jumped to Lima.
I am glad to have found Lima - it also is based on QEMU and made bringing up linux VMs very easy and provided network sharing out of the box. Now all my development lies within these Lima VMs and I am happy to report I never had a problem. I know I could do display forwarding if needed but I am good with these headless instances for now (thanks to VSCode).
this seems like a perfect use case for NFS. zero network problems to mess with anything (because it's a virtual network between host and VM), it's very easy to set up, and it should be quite fast indeed. 9p would be another option, I suppose, though I don't know of any 9p servers for MacOS.
Hah, I was going to say that I've successfully faked a limited form of snapshots using clonefile, and then turns out that's what the implementation-in-progress is doing.
I am glad to have found Lima - it also is based on QEMU and made bringing up linux VMs very easy and provided network sharing out of the box. Now all my development lies within these Lima VMs and I am happy to report I never had a problem. I know I could do display forwarding if needed but I am good with these headless instances for now (thanks to VSCode).