WSL works and tends to be somewhat more lightweight than typical VM solutions. It also comes with great Windows integration.
EDIT: you’re a bot
VMware player. Good for beginner in virtualization. Using it on my gamer that slowly morphed into staging server
What’s the difference for example with installing a linux os or trunas on virtualbox?
I personally don’t think this is a great idea aka taking your regular computer that you probably bank on, access sensitive sites, etc. and then torrenting on it and potentially opening up ports to said system.
Infrastructure is cheap so look at Hetzner, Contabo, Netcup, etc.
Like said in op he’ll have a VPN. This means you only open the ports with your VPN provider. You should under no circumstances open ports on your home network.
You don’t need linux, or anything fancy to run containers. If you’re not comfortable using a cli, get Docker Desktop. This way you can ‘see’ and manage your containers in a GUI.
From there, you can then learn about docker’s cli: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/cli/
The other option is to enable Hyper-V, make a Linux VM, and install Docker on the Linux VM.
They can install Docker/docker-compose onto windows and start running that way.