A sad news. Condolences to his family. May his legacy continue to inspire others as he did.

I come from VyOS and really liked it, but still prefer opnsense for the GUI, constant updates and plugins. VyOS started losing appeal once they opted for subscription stable iso access (even if they did give me a free subscription for some comment contribution in their repo). Also, I have to admit, that VyOS needs a fraction of the resources needed by opnsense.

I tried virtualizing Windows on proxmox and it went smooth

You can also evaluate to buy something like this for 3.5 or 2.5inch disks.