I've set up several VMs in VirtualBox with Mint and never had any issues. Might be worth a try.
I've always used Virtualbox with various linux distros without issue. My go to is usually Linux Mint using XFCE - xfce is a lightweight desktop environment including whrj it comes to graphics requirements compared to Gnome and KDE. I use the Virtualbox Guest Additions to get good integration with my host system.
It is also important to set up the guest machine properly so it runs well. I give it the max 128mb of video ram possible, 16gb syaten ram, 2 CPU cores to use (I have 6 on my PC), and a 50gb virtual hard drive at least. When setting up the distro I always install it to the virtual drive, and the first thing I do is install guest additions. I then run the machine at full screen on one of my two monitors.
My advice would be use a popular distro with a low overhead Desktop Environment, as graphics will be the main bottleneck. Also try to avoid using Snap and Flatpak in the system as they are more resource - so no to Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I'd go for Xfce, LXde spins of various distros - Mint is honestly fine if you want an Ubuntu related system that's easy to use and relatively stable. Otherwise Puppy linux is very lightweight and you can add just what you need. Debian would probably also be good to use forna truly stable environment.
Linux 101 stuff. Questions are encouraged, noobs are welcome!
Linux introductions, tips and tutorials. Questions are encouraged. Any distro, any platform! Explicitly noob-friendly.