If you are an advanced linux user then I would suggest giving a try to the following distros: arch, void, gentoo and (like you said in the post) nixOS.
The reason behind is that this distros are focused on the tinkering aspect of linux, the experience of setting up everything the way you want.
If you want to give a shot to WMs I would suggest i3, sway, dwm, dwl, river, bspwm, Qtile and hyperland (maybe focus more on the Wayland ones if you want to try the latest software).
In regards to the VM, you can alucate as much ram and cpu power to it to make it performe better if needed (when setting up and you can also adjust it afterwards, at least in virtmanager (KVM) ). And there is an aspect I haven’t really touched but heard that it improved performance which is gpu passthrough.
(I dont really limit processes and stuff, just simple alucation and configuration)
I havent gamed on it yet but it is pretty responsive. My specs are nvidia geforce rtx3060 and amd ryzen 7. Also i am using KVM as the hypervisor since it is type 1 which means better performance and safety overall.
Like others suggested, lemmy communities and some news sites like HackerNews.
But also some YouTube channels like Mental Outlaw, The Linux experiment and Brodie Robertson (most of them also have Odysee channels if you don’t want to use YouTube). Also Luke Smith (actually he shills a lot of foss software).