I used to do exactly what you're suggesting. I had a headless vm always running in my laptop and I used to ssh into it. I have turned the vm off since I started

I used to do exactly what you're suggesting. I had a headless vm always running in my laptop and I used to ssh into it. I have turned the vm off since I started using bash on Ubuntu on windows. There are hiccups, but 99% of the time I don't notice that it isn't "real" Linux.