I am looking to run a minimal Linux VM on windows (basically to run conda and python). Right now I run a virtualbox + ubuntu running headless with 1GB RAM. Are there better (i.e. lighter on resources and faster response) options, maybe Docker or WSL? I haven't experimented with docker much, but on windows it seemed to have hiccups when I tried a while ago. Right now docker complains it cannot run since hyper V set up for VirtualBox ; and I don't want to switch and experiment if docker is not much better.

If your are on windows 2004, do try out wsl2

I use wsl2 and it's the best solution. It's also super light and only consumes about ~200mb of RAM