I hear great things about OrbStack; unfortunately the licensing tied to their free offering doesn't play nicely with corporate environments (and we're cheap!).
I switched to Colima instead and couldn't be happier.
After years of trialling a variety of notebook setups, I eventually fell back to vscode & git. I've even given up on Markdown (nothing wrong with it, I just realised I never actually view my own notes in parsed Markdown so I stopped bothering).
All I need is a file structure that I understand, and an editor for typing and searching :)
Git is great for (i) persistence, (ii) availability and (iii) the merge flow encourages me to review/clean changes before merging them to main.
I switched to Colima instead and couldn't be happier.