@Smellincoffee :-
I had the exact same issue on the elderly Compaq desktop rig a few years back.
The Athlon64 X2 dual-core didn't support virtualization - instruction sets were too old, and it only had 3 GB of DDR1 RAM - so I got used to trying stuff out from either a LiveCD/DVD OR a USB stick. Now that I have a desktop rig with a ton of RAM, buckets of storage & a CPU that WILL run VMs, I no longer have any use for one.......I'm Puppy-only these days, and a quick'n'dirty install of a new Pup to bare metal takes less than 5 minutes.
I do run ChromeOS-Flex, and HaikuOS as well.....one from a USB stick, and one from a rescued PATA/IDE SSD out of the ancient Dell lappie that died last year (which I turned into an 'external' drive, housing it inside a dinosaur-era Compaq floppy-disk storage box I've had for more than 30 years). It connects via a SATA-to-USB adapter cable, and is perfectly content to run like that.
There's a ton of different ways you can do this. It's a case of figuring out which is most practical & cost-effective in terms of hardware resources, and which will work best - and boot most easily - for YOU.
I've tried a few of these 'cloud' VMs, and in my opinion I can't see what all the fuss is about. They're pretty slow, and don't seem to run all that well. 'Course, I'm spoilt; a Puppy running on modern hardware is like greased lightning, and is SO fast it just makes everything else
seem slow..!
Mike.
