To those who are using the newer MacBook pros, how easy and seamless it is to run Linux on it via Parallels etc without going all the way to Asahi etc? Like if i'm super comfortable with Linux, can I just get near native Linux desktop experience and forget that all of it is running on top of MacOS?
Parallels is quite good - I can watch 4K YouTube videos at 60fps with no noticeable frame drops on an M1 Pro, and general desktop animations, etc. are fine. That said, I do occasionally get rendering glitches, usually in Firefox where a small rectangular portion of the screen will briefly flash black while scrolling quickly through a page.
The biggest quality of life issue for me personally is the trackpad. Although support for gestures and so on has gotten quite decent in Linux land, Parallels only sends the VM scroll wheel events, so there's no way to have smooth scrolling and swipe gestures inside the VM, so it feels much worse than native macOS or Asahi Linux running on the bare metal.
It's pretty seamless, but you can't really get the macOS UI out of the picture entirely. You can run it fullscreen, sure, but even then there are still some shortcuts that are going to be handled by macOS, and also multiple displays etc.
OTOH if you're fine with macOS GUI but you want something like WSL for CLI and server apps, there's https://lima-vm.io
Why bother with that? Macos is a unix OS already.