My vote is also on Proxmox. I also started out with a mini PC about 6 months ago and installed proxmox. It has a few quirks regarding its disk usage you have to get used to, but its UI and setting up of VMs and LXC containers is so simple, you do not need any manual. You can easily build and tear down linux machines and play around with them. You cannot run docker images directly, but I use an LXC ubuntu container to run them, works flawlessly.
Which I don’t find reasonable tbh, at least for open source stuff. You are not actively supporting the Russian government, and a lot of Russians also don’t support the war. But to each their own.
I got myself a used/refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny, which works pretty well. Put in more ram and bigger storage and it is pretty beefy now as well as silent.
My vote is also on Proxmox. I also started out with a mini PC about 6 months ago and installed proxmox. It has a few quirks regarding its disk usage you have to get used to, but its UI and setting up of VMs and LXC containers is so simple, you do not need any manual. You can easily build and tear down linux machines and play around with them. You cannot run docker images directly, but I use an LXC ubuntu container to run them, works flawlessly.