Because the guest system relies on the host it cannot have the same performance as a host system, unlike a dual-boot system. In the example that follows VirtualBox, a free-and-open source hypervisor. The VMs in a host system is managed by a hypervisor, or Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), that manages one or more guest systems. Virtual machines work by emulating a computer system, including hardware, in a software environment, a technology that has been around for a very long time (e.g., CP/CMS, 1967). If this is the case, then introducing Linux via a virtual machine (VM) is a relatively safe and easy path to experiment with.

Whilst they might be familiar with their MS-Windows environment, because that's what they've been brought up on and what their favourite applications are designed for, they might also be 'Linux curious', especially if they are hoping to either scale-up the complexity and volume of the datasets they're working with (i.e., towards high performance computing) or scale-down their applications (i.e., towards embedded devices).

Or that MacOS is built on the same broad family of UNIX-like operating systems. Or maybe even that the Android mobile 'phone uses a Linux kernel. They may know that the overwhelming majority of embedded devices, such as home routers, use Linux. They might even know that every single supercomputer in the world uses Linux. Most people these have at least heard of Linux. All of this now leads to a some notes on using MS-Windows as a host for Ubuntu Linux guest machines.

A few years after that I gave another presentation on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), itself which (indirectly) led to a post on Linux and MS-Windows 8 dual-booting.

Some thirteen years ago I worked with Xen virtual machines as part of my day job, and gave a presentation at Linux Users of Victoria on the subject (with additional lecture notes).

Ubuntu 20.04 vm