@joss it can, but you would need to leave the machine running and install some of the VM, the best bet is to pick up a cheap dell optiplex from ebay and run it off that, it does not have to be high spec either as home assistant will run on a odriod and even a raspberry pi4. (mentioned the dell optifles as a small one of those is cheaper and easy to find at the moment that a pi4). Home assistant would be installed via a usb and os, it becomes accessable on your local network via a web browser. after you have installed it, in general it will find 60%-80% of the stuff via auto discovery of smart stuff you have already and ask you to configure it. Its a bit daunting at first but once you get into it it becomes an addiction, you can buy a dongle to add matter/zigbee support now too. which is a bonus, you can even instal homekit products to it as well as expose all the devices in home asssistant if you please…
then there is nabucasa which is a sub of 6.99 (not neccesery if you know how to set up duckdns or sim) which allows you to connect to alexa and google a quickway and also give you access to your home via the home assistant app (aval on both android and ios).