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”

Multiple versions, paths, and installs of Python. Using pip makes it worse.

I still don’t fully understand how to gracefully have multiple desktop environments and switch between them. When I want to try something new to me like lxqt, I usually spin up a VM.

If you do compile something, it is very easy to make it an installable package you could share. I’m not sure how the repos are managed

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

KiCAD for circuit boards FreeCAD to import those boards and do everything else

Mint is great. It also works well out of the box in virtual machines. I like the MATE versions for my older machines.

There is a major shift happening right now, and mint is slower than many to adopt changes. I’d argue that’s good for mint users, but it may be bad for you personally if you plan to learn about modern linux. Idgaf personally about X11 vs Wayland, because I just need to be able to use my programs.

Framework. They even have a factory seconds store, if you don’t need a perfect screen.

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.