If you ran a raw Ubuntu/fedora/whatever, you can use qemu/libvrt to run small virtual machines as required. You start and stop them with virsh, define them with simple xml files, and can easily automate the creation/destruction of them if desired.
if you’re automating the creation and deployment of vms, and the downstream operating systems, and not doing some sort of HA/failover meme setup… proxmox makes things way more complicated than raw libvirt/qemu/kvm.
Maybe for the initial setup, but nothing is more repeatable than automation. The more manual steps you have to build your infra, the harder it is to recover/rebuild/update later
Don’t get me wrong, I use libvrt where it makes sense but why would anyone go to proxmox from a full iac setup?
I do 2 at home, and 3 at work, coming from 4 at both and haven’t looked back.
My solution to this problem was to buy a $180 Dell workstation off eBay and install Ubuntu on that as my main workstation. My gaming desktop is now in the basement and runs sunshine. Moonlight over LAN is basically native, and solves the annoying reboot to switch tasks scenario.