@rev-morwen.eth
Update with learning Unreal Engine:
Decided to buy more ram for my laptop, should arrive in the mail today. Instead of running the engine on a virtual machine, gonna dual boot Pop!_OS instead as it has built in support for Nvidia drivers.
Was mulling over just buying a new laptop, but gonna hold off on that. My current laptop is at least 3 yo, but it still works perfectly fine and is a pretty beefy machine. Don't want to upgrade unless I get super serious with UE dev. For now I'm just dipping my toes in the water.