The biggest reason I use Slackware personally is that it's the only distro I'd consider a "full system" out of the box. What that means, is that I install it, and I don't really install much outside of the repos.
For example, the kde set comes with pretty much every KDE app. I do mean all of them. With other distros, I either have to go hunting for what packages are named what in the repos and spend hours getting everything setup and installed. While on Slackware, I pick the partitions, install, and I have a full desktop with everything I could possibly need.
Some would say "Oh, but that would take a lot of disk space.", and funny thing about that, is with BTRFS compressio enabled. A full install of Slackware is only 4gb =P
If you go down the VPS route, a headscale server on a cheap $3.50 VPS would be the way to go. Wouldn't even have to deal with IP addresses at that point, while still being able to self-host all your services, with the cheap VPS being a glorified switch/firewall.
It's a shame Tinc hasn't had a release, because 1.1 made it much easier to set up, and is what I used before switching to Headscale. I'd actually go back to it if 1.1 got officially released =P
Until recently, that "support" had been a barely supported forks of the linux kernel that were barely updated, and was so locked down that custom rom support was a pipedream on snapdragon processors. Which to be fair, is par for the course on most ARM chipsets (It's the reason you see a lot of custom roms for android have extremely old and outdated kernels)
I'm glad to see more ARM companies moving towards working with upstream projects, and not just making working on their stuff a PITA to protect "Trade Secrets" or some bullshit like that.
In theory, you could make a fake executable with the mkv file extension on a unix system, by making it a shell script with a bunch of garbage data at the end, marking it executable, and distributing it with a tarball. But the chances someone will do that is insanely low.
Also it has caveats:
It'd rely on your double clicking it, and having your file manager not warning you about it.
Video players wouldn't run the shell script code, if it'd run the file at all.
I mean, it would work, but you would be better off power-wise, price-wise, and performance-wise, going with a used office PC such as Optiplex.