Consider using toolbox[0][1], a tool built by and for Fedora (especially Fedora Silverblue and CoreOS).

Essentially, you enter an unprivileged container (no root, no daemon), but keep your username and home directory. What this means is you can switch operating systems but keep your environment and kernel.

I enter toolbox to build packages using build-time dependencies from Fedora Rawhide. Outside toolbox, my packages get updated as well.

As of 2019-10-30, only Fedora-based images have been officially created; however, others have made functioning PRs for Ubuntu and CentOS-based toolboxes.

Your containers can be saved to a special location that gets backed up. I back up mine with rclone[2] to my school's unlimited Google Drive storage.

[0]: https://github.com/containers/toolbox

[1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/toolb...

[2]: https://rclone.org/

I use Fedora Server for exactly that. It comes with Cockpit [0] out of the box, which I find to be a great management interface.

[0] https://cockpit-project.org/

I've used just about all of the "hypervisors" at one point or another. If this is all new to you, I'd suggest perhaps starting with Proxmox VE [0]. That'll give you a decent (web) GUI to use to manage everything. Once you understand how things work and have some familiarity with the concepts, then you can start looking at other hypervisors if you decide you want something different.

[0]: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve