I'm used to using Linux from the terminal. I have a new machine which I plan to use mostly headless but would occasionally like to run a desktop environment and play games with GPU acceleration. I know I don't have to launch the desktop environment on startup, but I was wondering if it's possible to have that entire portion containerized, like an instance in LXD.

I am trying Bazzite right now, I really like the idea of layering on top an immutable base. That's close to what I want. If I understand correctly, I could have a different layer for the headless part to keep them totally separate, but I'd have to do restarts to switch from one to the other.

I also think NixOS could also be what I want, just with a steeper learning curve.

I'm wondering if anyone has already set something like this up? It would be helpful to read about what software people have for this and their experiences using that.