the one thing linux really hasnt been made on par with winblows yet is the dreadful amount of options for android simulation -the most popular choice seems to be Waydroid, but its such an unneeded hassle to set up at all -genymotion is just slow -and than you have things like android x86 which entirely defeat the point of an emulator
Apps “forcing” you to update are the result of developers doing their jobs. Just because you decided to buy a cheap phone or a free Android distro that doesn’t come with any update guarantees doesn’t mean they have to pour in money to keep things working for you.
I don’t know how much money you’ve paid for those old apps of yours, but unless they’re a subscription developers won’t be able to keep outdated platforms like Android 6 going forever. Vote with your wallet, buy subscriptions from apps that do support your platform of choice. Google’s compatibility library works well in many circumstances, but the backwards compatibility hacks have to make financial sense for any company-backed apps.
It’s not hard to run Android apps on computers. Windows 11 runs Android apps without external tools. Linux can run them through Waydroid or Anbox. I don’t know if there’s a Mac version, you could Apple to build in an Android runtime like Microsoft did but it’s better to find a community that’s willing to build it for macOS instead. You get bonus performance for the ARM code running on an ARM CPU!
As for Arm on x64: years ago, before x64 Android and HAXM were a thing, I used to develop against ARM virtual machines. The performance hit is absolutely atrocious. What Apple did with Rosetta2 is amazing and you can’t get that type of performance without dedicated hardware.
I don’t know if the Windows runtime supports ARM emulation, but I’m pretty sure you can drop qemu-static into the Waydroid file system and run ARM apps on your platform of choice. Expect laggy animations and 100% CPU usage at all times.