Hmm, my edit below erased my original comment, as I wasn't paying attention... Anyway, the gist is that NixOS runs great in Parallels, using the patched parallels-tools module from this nixos config:
https://github.com/wegank/nixos-config/tree/main/hardware/pa...Some packages on nixpkgs aren't available for aarch64-linux, but mostly unfree stuff like Spotify that's available on macOS. Overall I really like it, and I hardly ever interact with the host OS anymore for dev work. That said, I still use macOS for casual browsing, since scrolling and trackpad gestures are smoother than in linux. Not a big deal, since copy/paste works fine.
edit to add a link to my config, which has a couple tweaks for screen resolution, etc: https://github.com/yusefnapora/nixos-system-flake/blob/main/...
Mine is using an older and more complicated version of the parallels-tools patch, so go with the one linked above if you end up using Parallels.
You could also try UTM, which now has support for Rosetta for x86 binaries. There's a good writeup for NixOS + Rosetta here that I can confirm works: https://xyno.space/post/nixos-utm-rosetta - I had some random instability with UTM though, so switched back to Parallels.