Yes indeed, I wasn’t sure about the architecture for the machine and when Apple started their own silicon, everything is happening both so fast and so slow, time is a flat circle.

Yes, Asahi is for Apple silicon, not Intel, I wasn’t sure when they changed over from Intel to Arm.

That said, if you have a fully spare computer which is not something you rely on for anything then installing the OS directly can give you better performance. I don’t know how powerful your main machine is but if it is significantly more powerful than the old machine a VM may be faster on that, it just depends on the performance of each machine.

Edit: I forgot to add, I used to work in IT doing support and I had Windows 7, Vista, XP, and NT all in VMs for supporting customers. I tried to get a reasonable Windows 98 image running but the hardware acceleration and comparability just wasn’t good enough at the time to make it worth it. It was fun full screening Windows NT with everyone else using Windows 7, it looked so retro and it was lots of fun to tinker with.

A lot of people talk about Asahi Linux as a good distro for Apple hardware, I wouldn’t know given I haven’t tried Apple hardware for decades. That said, installing on the bare metal is great, but first I would recommend a virtual machine.

Using a VM you can try different distros, test different desktop environments, and generally mess around without risk to your data or the usability of your machine in the early stages of figuring Linux out. Once you have tried a few and found a workflow that works for you you can install as a dual boot or even ditch Mac OS entirely. I would personally try a few different desktop environments including KDE, Gnome, and XFCE, along with some of the more obscure ones like in ElementaryOS and so on. Linux is all about options and choice so try some things and learn what works for you.

Ultimately, don’t take it too seriously. You don’t need the right answer, there isn’t one, just try some things and find what works for you. If it stops working you can always try something else later.