Depending on the software you need and how technical you are, Wine and Bottles may be a solution to not need an VM.

Huh, never heard of it! from what I gathered from the website its a central VPN? Wouldn’t that be overkill for a homelab scenario? Thanks for your response!

Thank you for not only taking the time to answer but also adding quite useful resources. I will look into it!

That seems like quite a large endavour. And I’m always a fan of alternatives. One thing I do not fully understand is the, I do not want to selfhost so its federated. Somebody needs to host in the end, why can’t it be you?