VMs to isolate software development work from personal space?
I am thinking of buying a macbook pro/ air. I am gonna use this device as my work laptop for freelance developlement, side projects etc. Due to budget constraints and logistics reasons this needs to be my personal device also, place where I manage my homelab, I have my passwords stored, personal emails logged in, sensitive media downloaded etc. I am okay to shell a few more bucks for getting extra ram, because that will be constraining factor.
Based on the comparatively frequent supply chain attacks, AI agents crawling everything on your device (I know this can be prevented with a little attention) I think its better to have isolation of work and personal space. It might be paranoia I understand, but I am irked. I also prefer to have a clean device of personal use, like no over the time heaps of applications, configs etc. Its might be better to delete or redo VMs. I say might because I haven't actually done it yet.
So what I am thinking of having a ubuntu VM on my mac where I will be doing heavy fullstack development with around 10 docker containers, 30 chrome tabs, slack, teams, frontend ui server, vscode and intellij ide. I can maybe shift communication apps like teams, slack to the main computer for meetings only. But i really prefer it to be inside VM.
Is someone else also doing this? Is this achievable? Is this just paranoia? Any other ways to get complete isolation like having a mac mini for work and remote into this machine? I live in a developing nation, internet infra is not very reliable across the whole country.