You might be kidding, but I actually run VMWare Player with full-screen linux at all times to have a terminal. It's free, switching to VM is simple alt-tab. You can share folders/drives, copy/paste works, it's even accelerated so I can use any "modern" window manager. Only things missing are snapshots, but I don't have those on hardware either. If I need to reboot the host, I can just pause the VM.