Basic Question Kali with Whonix but what Distro

I am thoroughly confused with my fundamental understanding now .
I understand on a virtual box I will need whonix gateway and then install or use live kali persistence in the virtual box and connect using the whonix gateway.
But all of this has to be done on a OS.
So its basically Level 0 (L0) base distro in which the virtual box is installed, L1 - Kali and Whonix.
What should be my best bet for the L0 base distro ? My understanding is that it should be light weight with best kernel and OS so the Virtual Box runs smoothly - further the base distro should have all the drivers so that Kali can use the drivers.
All the forums are suggesting Cent OS, Debian - but what if I go with Linux Lite ? Can anyone help here - please dont suggest Qubes - I tried installing it thrice and honorably failed three times. Will the base distro Linux Kernel, OS stability and performance have any impact on the distro running in virtual box ?
Will Fedora(Silverfin) or OpenSuse tumbleweed be a good option for something like this ?

First of all, the most important thing for running virtual machines is a reasonable CPU and a decent amount of RAM, this allows the host OS (could be Windows, Linux or Mac) to run a virtual machine whilst allowing resources for the guest OS (in this case Kali)

A virtual machine doesn't need drivers for the actual hardware, as these are also 'virtual' and the VM programme, (could be Virtual Box, VMWare or KVM) takes care of any 'virtual drivers'

As for the Host OS that could be anything you want, if you want to use a Linux OS as the host, try a 'live USB' version of something first, and make sure that the distro you choose supports all of you mchines hardware, many 'Lite' distros come with limited driver support 'out of the box' and in many cases they will need to have drivers added, WiFi adapters are a usual problem for example.

Qubes is not designed as a host, it sandboxes apps and processes from each other and is secure but slow because of it and won't work with VM's well.

Fedorta (the full version at least) tends to support most hardware out of the box, and it also has baked in support for VM's (you can use Gnome 'Boxes' which sets up a KVM virtual machine), so you wont need any additional software to get a Kali VM up and running.

You don't need a whonix gateway, a VM will use a connection bridged to the Host OS for network connections, by default you get a virtualised Ethernet connection to the host.
If you want to use Wireless networking and play with wireless tools, you will need to purchase a USB WiFi adapter, and use that, a VM cannot use a hosts WiFi direct, as it is already in use by the host OS.

Hope this helps!