I had the impression cloud was about the opposite - detaching your server software from physical machines you manage, instead paying a company to provide more abstracted services, with the ideal being high scalability by having images that can be deployed en masse independent of the specifics of where they’re hosted and on what hardware. Pay for “storage”, instead of renting a machine with specific hardware and software, for example.
Dual booting is problematic, as mentioned you’re messing with your partitions and could mess up your windows partition, but also windows can, unprompted, mess up your Linux bootloader. As long as you’re careful with partitions and know how to fix your bootloader from a live image, there’s no real issue, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
By the way, I recommend rEFInd for the bootloader when dual booting, it doesn’t require configuration and will detect bootable systems automatically.
A VM sounds like a good idea to try a few things out, but do keep in mind performance can suffer, and you might especially run into issues with things like GPU virtualization. If you want to properly verify if things work and work well enough, you’ll want to test them from a live system.
As a final note, you can give your VM access to your SSD/HDD - if you set that up properly, you can install and boot your Linux install inside a VM, and later switch to booting it natively. You still have the risk of messing up your partitions in that case, but it can be nice so you can look things up on your host system while setting up Linux in a VM.
it also won’t wake up from a month in sleep with an untouched battery the way a Switch does.
Any time I left my dock unplugged (after cleaning or whatever), next time I wanted to use the switch or joycons for something I found the battery drained :P
Not to say it isn’t better, or even way better, but calling it untouched seems a bit too exaggerated.
In this regard, I think Gigabyte just has you put the firmware in some accessible location (like on a USB drive) and update from BIOS?
I don’t think either has ntsync support enabled by default, but it’s supposed to have better accuracy or performance, thanks to putting the needed APIs directly in the kernel, right?