My primary use case for K3s is small machines, cheap VPS, Pi, etc. Would love to hear from folks who have had success with Talos in those spaces but last time I gave it a shot the welded shut hood prevented me from doing the little tweaks necessary to get running in those environments.

In the cloud or on prem I suspect folks are having better luck than I did, but also open to being wrong about this.

I'm early on in my Kubernetes journey and have opted to focus on Talos. Would you be able to share a bit more about the issues and limitations you encountered?

SRE here who has dealt with both. Talos is operating system and Kubernetes management system without a ton of batteries included.

K3s runs on existing operating systems with batteries included.