When I add a dish, I add my own picture of it.

Create a “universal” installer of sorts that can install many different OS’es and apps on them.

I don’t understand what you mean with “does decreases the hardware usage in some idle time”?

I also don’t understand what “overloading” Pop means.

Light virtualization and a few services - and sometimes also your desktop, when needed - shouldn’t be a problem, but it also depends on which services and how many.

In general, containerization is easier than virtualization, and has less overhead. If you want to stick with Pop, then you can install docker, docker-compose and portainer. Portainer provides a pretty decent web interface to create and manage containers.

You can make VMs possible by adding cockpit and cockpit-machines, so that you can create and manage VMs (I’m guessing that cockpit is available for Pop).

Otherwise Proxmox is a free hypervisor, based on Debian and pretty easy to learn, and then you could have one VM for your self-hosted stuff, and one VM, with Pop on it, to use as your desktop. Turn off when it’s not needed, turn on when it is.

From there, you can build out your homelab in a somewhat modular fashion, which will also mean that modifications will be less likely to break something, and easier to undo or fix.