Your comment as well as @[email protected] were really food for thought for me. stupid_asshole69 advising against, and yours as a cautionary tale.
This would be a complex stack to accomplish my goal. It occurs to me that it’d be mdadm (raid 1) > LUKS > btrfs since btrfs can’t do encryption which is right in the middle of that stack, so I couldn’t use it’s raid 1 functionality. If any of those pieces break, all the protection they would have otherwise provided me goes out the window.
And I’m not really worried about losing data. I already backup my personal files and most of my configs. The appeal with this kind of setup is the data redundancy and fairly quick recovery. But a partition clone like what saved you also works pretty well for that purpose. I don’t know what I’ll do just yet, but definitely taking all that in to consideration.
Would a VM work? I’ve read that you can run MacOS inside a VM. Though I haven’t attempted it (yet). Could do Windows in a VM too but virtualized ad-riddled spyware is still ad-riddled spyware.