Have you considered running KVM under Debian?I currently have a VMWare ESXI host machine in my home lab. I’m considering alternative platforms and happy to experiment, but also don’t want to get part way down a rabbit hole and then realize I’m suddenly dealing with a bunch of hard to surmount accessibility issues.
I’m also unsure about performing OS installs . is it possible to get audio over a VNC connection or something?
If you run Qemu/KVM, you can have text console access to the guest operating system. This worked when I last tried it, admittedly a number of years ago.
You could also run prebuilt images designed for use in a virtual machine instead of starting with an ISO 9660 file and using an operating system installer.
Much of the attention is shifting away from virtual machines these days and toward Linux containers instead. I am assuming in my reply that you actually want a virtual machine for some reason, but if what you really need is a container, then there should be fewer accessibility issues and less resource consumption. (The kernel is shared between the host operating system and the containers, but the libraries and running programs aren't.)
For containers, you would be best advised to look at Podman,
Docker, etc. I haven't had experience with these tools, so I can't
offer much by way of detail.