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you can run a vm on your pc for free or use WSL2 on winblows 11 with Debian/Ubuntu
Thank you all for your replies and suggestions.
@Snitchboss123, that's a very kind and generous offer, especially considering we don't know each other. I really appreciate it. However, I'd like to have at least a public IPv4 address, as that's one of the things I want to experiment with.
Regarding my homelab, my goal is actually to test things that can't easily be done only on a local network, such as DRP/Disaster Recovery scenarios, remote deployments, and Internet-facing services. That's why I'm looking for a VPS in the first place.
Based on your feedback, I think I'll start looking at low-cost paid VPS offers instead and compare what's available.
I honestly thought there were still some free (or very limited) VPS offers that would allow people to learn and get a feel for cloud hosting without requiring a credit card or a paid plan. From your replies, it seems that's no longer really the case, which is understandable given the amount of abuse providers have to deal with nowadays.
Thanks again everyone for taking the time to reply and for pointing me in the right direction.
Check us in Gdańsk, Poland.
Pico plan is at 25 EUR/yr, however it is 512MB RAM. 1x IPv4 + 1x Routed /64 IPv6 is included by default.
https://clientarea.strike.bz/index.php?rp=/store/intel-poland-vps-rdp/pico-intel-poland&language=english
I started both FreeVPS.org and FOSSVPS.org. I gave both of them away, and both seem still going pretty strongly! Which is great!
Eric from Crunchbits kindly accepted FreeVPS.org when the excellent guys on the team decided to use Blesta, which, as you know, is not 100% open source.
@msatt kindly took over FOSSVPS when the excellent guys on the team decided to go with Proxmox. Although Proxmox is 100% open source, I had been using Ubuntu and making VPSes with the Linux command line and cloud-init. Although one can, I believe, make VPSes with the command line in Proxmox, Proxmox has many of its own ways of doing things.
My goals are to use only 100% free software, and to make the VPSes with the command line, maybe with Linux and cloud-init. Alternatively, there has been progress in BSD virtualization, so, besides Ubuntu, or another Linux, maybe BSD on the Node could be considered.
My command line VPSes seemed to work fine with Ubuntu and cloud-init on a server donated by @alexhost that had about 50 users from here and Nodeseek and other places just before the time when @msatt took over. There were some VPSes with dedicated IPv4s, some with NAT, and IPv6 was available. I made a few mistakes along the way, from which I learned a lot. It was fun! @alexhost seemed to like what happened: "It was wonderful, the partnership we made with FOSS project."
At the moment, I am delighted to have a server kindly donated by @Hosteroid -- Thank you!
-- which is running NetBSD. @cmeerw is helping excellently with system administration, thank you so much! 
Free shell accounts are available to Low Enders whose real identities are openly available on the web.
Looking forward I do have FOSSVM.org waiting for someone to donate yet another free dedicated server. Probably I might again do something with Linux and cloud-init similar to the way the Alexhost server was handled before @msatt kindly took the server over.
Thanks for the mention, @totally_not_banned!
Best wishes!
Tom