You do not need a Mac Mini shrine to use OpenClaw. You need a stable runtime, a reliable chat surface, and fewer fragile steps.
People overfocus on the machine and underfocus on the workflow. The assistant does not care about the romance of the hardware. It cares whether the runtime is stable and reachable.
VPS or managed environment with sane uptime.
Telegram is the obvious answer.
Updates, backups, and a clear recovery path.
If you want to experiment, use any stable Linux box. If you want it production-ready without turning your life into ops theater, use hosted.
ClawHatch skips the VPS wrangling, Telegram bot setup, updates, backups, and first-message debugging. If you'd rather use OpenClaw than babysit it, that's the point.