Not necessarily. Tailscale uses their own servers in order to do the negotiation, but once the connections are opened on both ends you should be directly connected to each other. All without port forwarding or any config on your end.

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works

Start with a VM on your computer and see what you want to do/need from there.

Leaving a laptop on is (almost) free.

1/3 of my refurbished drives died early. It tested fine before I put it in my raid array, but about 3 months in I was getting error after error. I swapped it with my spare and they’ve been fine so far.