Check out distrobox. Basically podman or docker containers, but automatically more integrated into the host system. GUI programs work pretty much out of the box with it.
Headscale is pretty light on resources, especially since it doesn't come with a webui (there is third-party ones like headplane you can use though). RAM usage is like 70mb for me currently.
If you want to have more control about it and become independent of the SaaS offering, you can even selfhost headscale, a FOSS tailscale control server. I run it myself with zero issues.
Please put an NSFW tag on this. I was on the train and when I read this I had to start furiously masturbating. Everyone else gave me strange looks and were saying things like "what the fuck" and "call the police". I dropped my phone and everyone around me saw this post. Now there is a whole train of men masturbating together at this post. This is your fault, you could have prevented this if you had just tagged this post NSFW.
Maybe something like Elvish or Nushell could be worth a look. They have a lot of similarities to classic shells like bash, but an improved syntax and more powerful features. Basically something in between bash and Python. Not sure about disk footprint or general availability/portability though
Check out distrobox. Basically podman or docker containers, but automatically more integrated into the host system. GUI programs work pretty much out of the box with it.