No budget needed: Tailscale plus built-in Screen Sharing is free and the most reliable stack for daily remote work on Mac — upgrade to Jump Desktop only if you want it smoother. This guide compares four options and fixes lid-close and sleep pitfalls in 5 minutes.
Node is the required runtime because the canonical state store uses node:sqlite — Bun is only for installing dependencies. Windows changed the most: there is now a native Windows Hub companion app that installs without administrator privileges and can provision its own app-owned WSL distro for the Gateway.
Ghostty is a fast, native, general-purpose terminal emulator. cmux is a terminal built on top of Ghostty, specifically designed for AI coding agents. They're not competitors — they operate at different layers.