In my last employed job I used Virtual Machines quite a lot

Ha ha, same here! Well, virtual machines residing on Dev's workstations and a large on-premise test lab, running a wide variety of OSes and applications ... then along came AWS and maintaining our largish on-premise Test Lab was largely replaced by firing up scripted multi-machine test environments on demand in the cloud.

Update: Though I'm too cheap to do so, instead of installing Linux locally on a dedicated PC in your home office, you could rent a Linux instance (with Perl pre-installed) in the cloud for short periods, and use that for your Linux testing.