It appears that the minikube command will create a stand-alone .kube/config file that can be shared on any system to work with accessing the k8s API for that minikube from anywhere on the same subnet. However, when providing your own CA (or interm CA) in ~/.minikube/certs before doing a minikube start the resulting .kube/config file has dependencies on file paths within the local .minikube directory that must also travel to the any hosts on the same subnet that want to issue kubectl commands (and the like) using that information. This just adds a few steps to setup in such cases.