The one missing feature I wish existed in PC gaming (no clickbait title: game suspend)

So.. I've been a PC gamer for decades, I gamed both on windows and linux, I remember when the only games available on linux were tux racer, battle for wesnoth, and a bunch of broken wine games with buggy text rendering. This is to say, I love PC gaming. But also I've been a console gamer for almost as much time, I owned many consoles all my life and now I own a PS5, a switch, and even a steam deck (which I consider a console for the purpose of this post).

On top of that, I'm also a parent with a very active toddler. Most of my gaming time happens on the downtime, when my son is sleeping, or when I get 10 minutes breaks here and there throughout the day. This brings me to the main issue of this post: I really really really value the ability to jump in and out of games quickly as I often need to pause/suspend a game to go look after my son, and come back to it later to continue where I left off.

This is a solved problem on consoles (including the steam deck). On switch, PS5, steam deck, etc I can just "suspend" the session and in less than a second the entire console goes to sleep and I can pick it up later without worrying about saving progress or having to leave it up running for hours before I can get back to it (if I even can).

On PC, this problem hasn't been solved. This is because my PC is not just a gaming machine. I run multiple apps and programs. I have a local webserver, a local ssh instance, a bunch of local applications and stuff that is running that I access from anywhere else in the house, etc etc. I know you can "suspend" an entire PC (this is basically what a steam deck does), but I cannot afford to suspend my entire gaming PC every time I need to "pause" a game.

It would be amazing if it were possible to suspend individual game sessions and resume them later. I thought about applications that might dump a process memory and retrieve it later, and I think a few exist, but games are very complicated. They require local state, sockets being left open, GPU memory/state, and a lot of other stuff (this is ignoring networking, which I don't care about). I'm wondering, does anyone know of any program that allows you to freeze/suspend games and resume them later, on Linux?

I think one solution could be to run games inside a VM environment and then suspend that, but I'm not sure if I want to incur the performance penalty and hassle of installing every single game I want to play inside a VM, especially because it just overcomplicates things and makes it a much worse experience in general.

Anyone else share my pain?