Fedora is a great distro for development (used by Torvalds himself ;-).

If RAM is a problem you could try using ZRAM. ~~Unlike the name suggests,~~ this compresses data in RAM instead of swapping to disk, so that more data fits in there than normally available. Fedora for example uses ~~zswap~~zram by default with a value of max(0.5*RAM, 4GB) but can be configured to utilise more.

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EDIT: confused zswap and zram

For the kind of workload you're describing, 16GB of RAM was on the low end like 5 years ago. Your number one priority should be getting more RAM. For what you're doing vmware is at least better than HyperV, and depending on what people are doing with their machines there can be pros and cons favoring Windows, linux, OSX, ... in your case Windows is factually the worst choice. When working as a developer with linux native technologies, use linux. If you insist on your kids playing with your work machine (interesting choice), and they "need" Windows, then dual boot. Other than that I'd second another users advice to go with fedora (easy to use, up to date, no bullshit). But do yourself a favor, go bare metal, and get more RAM.

Arch

Also, why are you using windows as the host? If you had linux as the host you could use QEMU/KVM which is way faster

The immutable Fedora releases, like Kinoite, have been the best development distros for me. Immutable Fedora releases come with Toolbox for making per-project containers, so you can have separate de-cluttered dev environments for each project. Toolbox containers are not isolated environments like virtual machines, so performance is on-par with bare-metal as well.

I don't know if Sliverblue or Kinoite is the right choice for your exact workflow, but if you're looking for a Linux host that "just works" out of the box, has a trivial learning curve, and provides serious quality of life improvements then definitely look into Fedora Kinoite.

I run Ubuntu Mate, and all my work shiz is containerised. But I also have more RAM than Jesus Christ himself. My laptop works fine and it has more modest RAM.

i would say endevouros (arch based) if you want something more technical but still beginner friendly, or linux mint is always a good start otherwise. i3 is great for development, but may be hard at the start ig

I've got an old ThinkPad w/ 16GB RAM. My daily workflow is a combo of Emacs, a bunch of JVM languages, Make, Docker and minikube. I've been running openSUSE Tumbleweed for ages and am quite happy w/ its performance, package availability and being up-to-date.