I want to self host some services offered by HomelabOS in my personal computer. What are the pros and cons of doing it on a virtual machine vs doing it directly on my computer with the dockers that HomelabOS installs? There are some services that I would like to make public like Funkwhale.
I don’t see much reason to use either a VM or a container. Your desktop computer can be a server as well: it was a common pattern until not so long ago to have your own web/mail server running on your primary desktop computer.
I mean if you have way too much computing resources to spare then sure feel free to use various forms of virtualization but that makes everything so much harder to configure and deal with… if you need some form of isolation from your main computing tasks, then using another machine is the only safe way as any form of virtualization can be broken sooner or later.
If you’re looking for a selfhosting distro i would personally recommend to take a look at yunohost, libreserver or freedombox, all of which use little resources because they don’t use useless virtualization.