I use Unraid as my host OS with a Windows 11 gaming vm. If you say at my computer you would never know it's not native. I can shutdown/reboot windows and it doesn't affect any of my home server applications, including a mastodon instance.
If you're interested in the virtualization angle, I can't recommend ProxMox highly enough. It's insanely slick and powerful, and totally open source. It doesn't handle file sharing well natively, but you can easily spin up a file server VM. It can also do GPU passthrough, though it does require a little bit of fanangling in the terminal.