It’s usable and the security benefits are definitely important when working with multiple security domains (separate clients each with their own confidential data and third-party dependencies, where you don’t want one client’s malicious NPM dependency affecting the other).
However, there are cons. It’s only really usable in a stationary environment; it completely kills battery life and even basic tasks such as (non-HD) video display maxes out a single CPU core so it’s just not worth trying on a laptop. Hibernation doesn’t seem to be supported by default which becomes risky when combined with the extreme power usage.
Only laptops so far, with 4+ cores and 32+GB RAM and 500G+ disk.
It was working fine on my Lenovo T470p, and it runs pretty sweet on Lenovo P14s. Except that suspend is not working. ( Hopefully is resolved soon ).
It's always a problem with battery, but with suspend working fine it's quite easy to get a solid 30 days uptime even though you move around. ~3h runtime with ~10 vms running.
I wouldn't say it's perfect, but I wouldn't choose anything else if I would do it all over. Totally worth the extreme learning curve ;-)
My collegue actually runs on 16G, but he has to consider memory when starting a VM, but it's doable.
You can run on 8G, but it wouldn't be a good daily driver. But maybe if you have a very specific purpose?
24G+ is comfortable. I'm currently at 48G and have 43G "mapped" to VMs. It's very easy to use a lot of RAM!