Wow, looks cool.

BASED

that final idea is genius, not going to lie. Building a PC hasn't really changed that much aside from some ports being renamed.

From what you told, just putting in a very light distro to your current laptop (like debian or lubuntu) on a new SSD could do exactly what you want; but if you don't think it'll cut it; a used thinkpad could do the job just well. Though its specs will determine how performant your PC will work.

A decent-ish Core i3 or Ryzen 3 series processor (or higher if you want) will do the job well, 8GB RAM should pair well with it, As for storage, using an SSD would increase responsiveness a lot and make the boot times faster. Since you have another computer, you can just install Linux using a flash drive even if the computer you bought came with Windows. Do not get a Celeron/Athlon processor, they're manufactured e-waste.

Laptops with discrete GPUs tend to be on the heavier end (as in weight), be aware if you're planning to get one. They're definetly more performant in graphic demanding applications, but from what you told me you likely don't need it.

As for distros, choose whatever looks better and not complicated.

shitty company, but a lot of game devs have experience on it, and doesnt have the difficulty of getting a new hire to learn a new engine.

You can simply use the same key to activate your VM. You can get your license key by typing this to command line

wmic path softwareLicensingService get OA3xOriginalProductKey

Retail keys are meant to be transferable across multiple computers, and even OEM keys are bound to the computer's motherboard. However if there's any problem with activating the VM feel free to use the irm https://get.activated.win/ | iex trick, as even software audits done to corporations just take the billed license count and the PC count that uses Windows as a reference, and don't really care about how you activated Windows.

If you need GPU Passthrough, use VMWare or QEMU. If you don't, any virtualisation software should do the trick.

you can do better by getting a domain :D

ah yes indeed,what could go wrong with giving a group of people unlimited access to all voters in the US?