VMs aren't a hassle! I'm a dev and I work out of a VM and I have one on my home machine. You just need enough RAM to allocate, enough CPU threads to allocate, and space on your hard drive to allocate for the VM. I've got 32 GB RAM and a 4c/8t 7700K. I give my VM 200 GB of storage (dynamic allocation so it is like 50 GB then grows as I add stuff), 10 GB of RAM and 3 "threads" (in VirtualBox it will call them cores and it might complain if I had given it 4 "threads" because then it thinks I won't have any CPU resources for the host).
Check out VirtualBox. It's free, and all you would need is the ISO for the OS you're setting up.
Ungeheuer1
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