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.
Yes, it's paid software (like Windows). It's $60 for a lifetime license. You can download and play around with it, no need to activate for 30 days. I would check out YouTube to get a better sense, the docs are a bit dry 😂 https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/vm-management