Not helping here, but I heard a guy with Guix did that. Guix just builds a profile with the extra desktop parts, run it in a local container if you want and add that profile to the local software stack. Not a vm but maybe you don’t need it ? Both the system, home and the desktop profile are declarative, so very mobile. I think he had his DE user profile remote also, so extremely minimal/air-gapped and stable solution with almost zero local data: system, home, desktop-profile, remote user profile (ldap etc).
In declarative operating systems, you describe what you want, and the system builds it for you. Your whole system configuration is a few files of std code (learning experience ;). Personally, I’m done with the usual monolithic distros. They are too error prone for my taste, and not really moving with the dev flow of operating systems imho.
Anyway, just a loose rumor/idea, I have no links and don’t actually know how to do it, sorry.








Alternative idea for the adventurous lot - or extreme self-hosters: Buy an old Xeon datacenter server with 1.5tb ddr3 ram (separately). Ddr3 still costs around a dollar pr gig (a month ago), so this rig with two xeon and 24 * 64gb ddr3 ram will cost ~1900$ + transport: ~2k.
(OR an older pc motherboard with 4*64 channels or similar)
DDR3 is a bit slower, use more power, and the server is big/noisy, but the difference in price is unbeatable, and it’s a hell of a KVcache (for ai) if you put a gpu in it.
Note though, that power expenses are going up in the West.