Dell Thin Client type machine with a 2TB SSD of the essentials. Backs up once a week to my gaming desktop. Has enough horsepower for Homeassistant, Jellyfin, adblocking. Enough fast USB for two 2.5GBE. Upgraded to 16GB RAM before the crisis, but could make due with 8GB. Cheaper than a raspberry pi for only a few extra watts.

Like how the Australians say No

My napkin math is similar, although I do wonder about transcoding machines where the old one is using CPU vs newer solutions in the GPU.

Have you considered putting your children in one of the storage freezers? /s

From my experience with tailscale so far - there are so many different ways to have it configured well. If it works well for you having it on the host, then go for it. I have home assistant in a VM with tailscale and tailscale on the (windows) host. This works well for my needs and I don’t mind having it running “twice”

Can I request a hack? How do I handle several different versions of Python installed, which one is used for pip stuff, and how sudo/running as services changes all of this.

I chose to set up grafana, mqtt, etc for an RV instead of home assistant. Little more lightweight for the raspberry pi 3 I used. Pulling together solar info, so we could see how long the AC would keep running on the road

I think I had a similar problem a couple weeks ago. Make sure they are adding the device to your tailnet, by default it adds the new machine to their own tailnet. I know I hit some kind of issue like that, at least.