VirtualBox has improved tremendously in the last seven years. In that same time, progress on VMware Fusion and Workstation has slowed (they got rid of most of the dev teams, if I remember correctly).

I'd recommend just sticking with VirtualBox unless VMware has some feature(s) you need and/or you have the extra money to blow.

You can even start with VirtualBox and move to VMware later if you find a reason to. You can easily convert any existing VMs back and forth, etc.

---

(I've got a full vSphere cluster here in my home lab and VMware Workstation on my workstation and primary laptop. I've decided that I won't be giving VMware any more money, though.)

VirtualBox is free. Download it and try it out and you won't loose anything. If your on Windows Pro, Hyper-V is in the box. I spend most of my time on Windows inside Hyper-V and my Linux box uses VMware workstation. Haven't used VirtialBox in a while, but as I said, it's free. Download it and try it out!

Docker?

And what does docker run inside? Unless your running Linux on your desktop or using Windows Containers, you still need some sort of Virtualization.... Windows used Hyper-V and the Hyper-V components. MacOs uses something else... but it's still needed...