Distrobox is similar to Fedora’s Toolbox.
It allows you to run a Linux distribution integrated into your desktop environment. It uses podman (prefered) or docker containers to do this.
Essentially it creates a container that shares your $HOME and sets up the environment to integrate into your desktop as seamlessly as possible.
Typically people would use it with a “immutable” (read-only root) Linux distribution like Silverblue for building development environments. But you can use it with any Linux environment.
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox
I run Silverblue on my desktop, but run Emacs out of a Arch Linux container. I launch Emacs with a .desktop file, which means it looks and behaves like a normal GUI application.
Flatpak is very good for desktop applications, but any sort of command line or daemon type service it falls short. Emacs, especially Emacs Doom, is very complicated with lots of dependencies in applications and LSP libraries and multiple languages and that sort of thing. Not super easy to use with Flatpak, but distrobox is ideal for that containerizing sort of thing.
The problem with hosting kubernetes on VPSes is that exposing the Kubernetes API to the public is pretty sketchy. I know a lot of people do it, but I don’t like the idea.
I also like having multiple smaller Kubernetes clusters then a single big one. Easier to manage and breakage is more isolated. You can incorporate external services into kubernetes pretty easily using kubes services and endpoints.
I suggest using K3s as it is very lightweight, easy to deploy, and is k8s compliant. There are default set of services k3s deploys by default and are designed for more ‘IOT’ applications. Things like service-lb. These things can be disabled if you want during install time.
For managing it I like to ArgoCD on a ‘administrative’ kubes cluster local to you. It has no problem connecting to multiple clusters and has a nice declarative yaml files for configuring things that work well with a git-based workflow. The web UI is nice and is used widely.