Dual boot will be your best bet, but FYI, the reason VMs are not supported is because they don’t handle USB correctly for the case of a USB device which repeatedly disconnects and reconnects (which is what happens during flash). You could make it work, but it would be up to you to be sure USB passes through correctly, and that your VM runs on a true Linux filesystem type (you’d need an ext4 filesystem, and would have to avoid something like NTFS). Different VMs will behave differently among users here, but some have had VMware work (and others) after some work.