Setting up Octoprint on the same PC I am working with

General
1

Please excuse me if this is a stupid question. I'm completely new in Octoprint and very new (1 year) in 3D-Printing.
As I see there are two different showcases for using OP (beside all the great features)

  1. my printer is far away from my workstation and therefore I want to control it remotely
  2. though my printer is nearby (my situation) the workstation I want to use Octoprint to avoid the stupid handling with the SD-Card.

Of course I can buy a Raspi and put this between my PC and my Printer.. BUT. . -- and this is the question. Shouldn't be possible to setup octoprint on the same workstation I am working with? I could use a virtual machine for example ? Or -deep deep in my brain I remember about a virtual Python environment. But I have no experiences with that.
If you think this makes sense --> please let me know and and perhaps I have luck and there is still a description about that showcase.
many thanks
Karl

2

On the download page, if you scroll down, there are links to many different ways of installing OctoPrint. On Windows, macOS, Linux and in a Docker container.