[singlepaynews]

"set up a cloud instance ahead of time and just boot it up"

That sentence is the closest to what I'm imagining--the thin client to personal computer, your use case is interesting (hackathon peripherals); I'm thinking of this as a lifetime-durability play.

Basically what if my home's NAS could also serve all my applications, and at any given time I really just have a KVM into it. If we assume network is fast enough, that would achieve the UX I want, which is that the KVM is effectively disposable and the personal computer stuff all stays intact.