> You didn't happen to find anything to simplify the deployment process here, did you?

No, unfortunately not, the Windows VM setup + Forgejo Windows runner was the most painful thing for me to setup, no doubt. It's just such a hassle to reliably set things up, even getting logs out of it was trouble... To be fair, my Mac Mini was manually setup at first, then I have Nix on top of it, while Windows I've 100% automated it, so not entirely fair comparison, automating the Mac Mini setup would be similarly harsh I think. But it's a mix-match of Nix for configuring the VM and booting it, XML files for "autounattend" setup, ps1 bootstrapping scripts and .cmd script for finalizing, a big mess.