Amphetamine is the Mac version of Caffeine. It basically keeps your display on for a set amount of time without having to modify system settings.

If you have the ARM silicon chip your VM options are limited but possible. VMWare Fusion is free for personal use but since this is work you can likely get reimbursed easily. You can get Ubuntu running by downloading the ARM Ubuntu server iso and installing apt package ubuntu-gnome-desktop and you’ll want open-vm-tools-desktop, open-vm-tools, and likely build-essential. You can also cross compile a distro you like but only that, Kali, and Manjaro have ARM ISOs to my knowledge