just tried out lima (a VM for running Linux on a Mac) and it's so much nicer to use than vagrant https://lima-vm.io/
to use it, I just had to run:
$ limactl start default
(optionally edit config file, but you don't have to)
$ lima
by default it mounts my home directory as read-only inside the VM and forwards ports, so I don't even need to configure directory mappings
(there's also a container runtime called colima built on top of lima, which I haven't tried)
ended up trying out OrbStack for running Linux VMs because I was having some trouble with the networking in lima (I'm trying to use tun/tap devices and it was struggling with that for some reason)
OrbStack is equally easy to set up (though not open source), and the networking does seem to work much better.
https://orbstack.dev/