ArtikBanana

Just chiming in about Tailscale.
The initial connection uses their server just to reach / connect to the other peer. After that, the peers are connected directly and all communication is direct.

There is a mention of the smashed window, but there are other articles that show it being smashed in a video. Like this one - Which has more details in general

I might have misunderstood you, but data transferred inside the tailnet will always be encrypted by Tailscale.
So if you're connected to a public wifi and someone's looking at your traffic, accessing a random http site would be clear text, but accessing an http site inside your tailnet will be encrypted.

Unless you define an exit node and tell Tailscale to use it. And then all your traffic will be encrypted from the view of the one looking at your traffic logs from the public wifi (and clear text from the exit node to the random http site).

There's no need, but if you really want to, you can do it through Tailscale - Provision TLS certificates for your internal Tailscale services

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There's also Thrive
(which is open-source)

Transcend ssd220s (4tb SATA) can be found for really nice prices.
Even had a thread about this one on Lemmy cuz I wasn't sure how good it is (it's great).

Framework laptops don't come with Linux out of the box, but Linux is very nicely supported and tested on them.

Well I use Fennec for Android from F-Droid, which has the option of using custom collections for addons.
I don't think it's possible yet on "normal" Firefox other than Nightly.