Yes, I have several virtual machines set up with various operating systems. But I run Ubuntu in a standalone installation, on bootable USB. I am running Ubuntu Studio on a Sandisk Extreme microSD card in a USB 3 adapter. The Extreme card has very good read/write speeds for not much money. I doubt that a lesser card would perform very well with this operating system.
Ubuntu Studio is extremely good because it comes with a bunch of useful applications right out of the box and the Plasma Desktop by KDE is amazing and easy to configure. On my laptop a standalone installation makes full use of the GPU which is a real challenge to get working properly in a virtual machine If you have not tried this flavor of Ubuntu out I would highly recommend setting up a live installation on a fast USB drive and checking it out.
Our mainframe is Linux and our Java Development Platform is a Ubuntu VM. I see more than I want of it although I have been toying taking a job after retirement where I just write bash scripts. The feds use them quite a bit.