You can attach a fake one in software via XVFB (X Virtual Frame Buffer). It’s a little involved if you aren’t familiar with X, but it only took me an hour or so to get setup. Then you don’t need any hardware at all, and can set whatever resolution you’d like.
If that were solely true, there would be a lot more competition in the field right now. Amazon, (and to a much lesser extent the other 2 big names, GCP and Azure) are so massive not because they have a lot of power (plenty of other companies like digital ocean or OVM have plenty of scaling power too)— but because the integrations between their products are so seamless. Most of that functionality has a foundation in FOSS software that they’ve built on top of.
I would love to switch, and I tried to the other day, but I discovered that Firefox still doesn’t support integrated WebAuthn tokens (I.E. using Touch ID in lieu of YubiKeys). That is (unfortunately) a non-starter for me, as I use that technology everywhere, and I’m not intentionally weakening my security posture to switch. I’m honestly really surprised to find this feature disparity, as this feature has been generally available elsewhere for years. I’m a developer, so maybe I’ll take a crack at implementing it myself sometime, but it’s a big enough deal that I genuinely can’t switch yet :(
Actually, Windows does allow you to use an alternate “compositor”— a feature which is used quite frequently in the industrial/embedded space. Windows calls them “custom shells”. The default is Explorer, but it can be set to any executable.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/customize/shell-launcher