We've a shared beefy Threadripper workstation in my lab that has a boatload of RAM and cores to spare. We set up Qemu + KVM in order to run a big Windows VM that we use mainly for MS Office via RDP connections and when we really need Visual Studio. We also have a FreeBSD and a Aarch64 Linux instance that we use for testing. It's amazing how flexible Qemu is, and how reliable the whole stack can be.
This has really freed me up because I'm no longer tied to a single machine. My home dirs are mounted volumes that are also backed up, so I can tear down and rebuild the environment with a single command (which means that my environments are also deterministic). I can connect to them from anywhere on the planet, using any machine as a client (even my phone or a tablet). My main laptop is now a weaksauce 1080p chromebook that acts as a glorified thin client and web browser.
[1] https://github.com/kstenerud/virtual-builders