Ernest

I've recently decided to use the desktop PC I'd put together a few years ago. It sports 32GB RAM, a1TB NVMe M.2 SSD and a 2TB internal hybrid drive. Since my Lenovo Legion 5 laptop has become my daily driver, the desktop has largely become dormant, so I installed Proxmox and relocated it to live next to my new TpLink DECO BE23 MESH WiFi 7 router. Since my new router comes with only 2 Ethernet ports, I had to wait for the 5-port unmanaged switch and a pack of new 3-foot Cat-6 Ethernet cables arrived before I could get everything connected and ready for use. Now it serves as my home lab.

Beyond the fact that I enjoy tinkering with OSes and trying new things, I'd been searching for a good, dependable, backup utility that functions in a manner similar to Macrium Reflect in that it creates full and incremental backups on a schedule of my choosing. Gemini AI suggested Veeam Agent, a free for personal use, stand-alone, community-driven system based on Veeam's enterprise grade backup utility. I downloaded a copy and set up a Debian Trixi powered storage container to store my images, so now Veeam Agent generates an incremental image every day, with the creation of a full system image on the first Monday of every month.

My next two projects were to create VMs for Windows 11 Pro 25H2 and Garuda KDE-Lite Linux, the two OSes I dual-boot on my laptop to be used for experimentation and software testing with the intent of determining its usefulness for me before committing to installing it on either of my bare metal systems.

The next project I'm planning to try will be another storage container to store the daily snapshots Garuda Linux takes to mitigate the effects of a broken update (Garuda is an Arch-based distribution, and defaults to using btrfs and snapper), but I'll have quite a bit of research ahead of me to determine whether I can even implement such a thing. :)

Ernie

Throughout my history of using GNU/Linux, I have always dual-booted it with whichever version of Windows was current at the time, and I've finally settled on my new 'home' distribution - Garuda KDE-Lite Linux, dual-booted with Windows 11 Pro (currently version 25H2). Garuda supports many DEs a user can choose from, all of which share the same base system, coupled with an amazing community. In their help forum, they go so far as to provide a template that any user requesting help is expected to conform to, or they may receive few if any responses other than a response from a moderator that completing the template is expected, professionally expressed (I learned my lesson the first time I requested help there :) ). On the few occasions I needed to request help, responses arrived within a day, containing useful, comprehensible information/solutions.

My reasons for each OS differ, but with KDE Plasma on Garuda I'm easily able to adapt the distribution to how I do things, rebranding it as mine from boot to reboot/shutdown, and it makes a perfect playground for all the experiments I engage in (I call them adventures), so I guess it could be said that it's the sense of satisfaction I derive from each accomplish with it. On Windows, I take great satisfaction each time I find yet another way to wrangle it into something that bends to my will, not the other way around, not to mention the joy I derive from thwarting Microsoft's many attempts to make their OS an advertising platform for their other products, and eliminating/limiting the telemetry they collect from my use of their OS.

As I see it, Garuda Linux understands that my computer belongs to me, and that their OS is a guest, while it seems as if Windows fails to understand this, so I take control of it rather than allowing it to control me.

Well, I've rambled on enough, and if you've come this far, and you want to know more about how I took control of Windows, or more about Garuda, please reply

I began my digital life with MS-DOS 3.1 on an IBM-compatible PC powered by an Intel 8088 CPU, 640KB RAM, and a 100MB internal MFM hard drive. Around the time I began to make friends with Windows 3.1, I started hearing about this new OS called Linux, but at that early point in the OSes history, it was little more than a curiosity that required me to try to figure out how to build everything from source, which had to be downloaded, file by file, so I didn't get anywhere with it then, at least not until the late 1990s, when curiosity got the better of me, and as distribution after distribution (RedHat, Suse, and Debian) failed to install successfully, I stumbled onto Mandrake Linux, by which time, my determination drove me to keep trying to find something that could install, then reboot into some semblance of a usable system. Mandrake was the first distribution that fit that distribution, even though I had to interact with the Mandrake community from Windows 95 to get my Ethernet adapter to work correctly. I continued using Mandrake through its multiple mergers/evolution's until the company stopped developing the distribution, then named Mandriva. As a Mandrake/Mandriva email-registered user, within about a month, I received a message informing me that several of the Mandriva development team had set out to develop a fork of the distribution that would be known as Mageia (IIRC, French for Magic), which I adopted until version 8, when I encountered an issue I was unable to resolve.

That launched me on an extended period of distro-hopping through more distributions than I can/care to remember, notable among which were Linux Mint Debian Edition, Fedora, and Debian, but none of them felt like 'home'. I had one criteria in my selection for the next distro, that it be community-driven, not dependent on some company for it's existence, my primary reason for moving on from Fedora.

(See my follow-up - if interested)

[QUOTE] "While Wi-Fi 8 is still in development, the goal this time is very different. This new standard will have approximately the same maximum data rate, support the same number of spatial streams, use the same 4096-QAM modulation, work on the same bands, and support the same 320MHz channel bandwidth compared to Wi-Fi 7." [END QUOTE]

Does the above indicate that Wi-Fi 7 routers could be upgraded to Wi-Fi 8 through firmware upgrades? I'm not a trained technician, so I'm hoping that readers with greater knowledge will be able to clarify the differences in hardware. Thamk you!

Because I'm a retiree who does not write for my living, and I'm the sole user in my home, my needs differ significantly from yours as follows:

I dislike Microsoft's implementation of OneDrive and how it incessantly nags the user to enable its so-called backup feature, I configured it to keep all my files on my computer, then I deleted the app all together. Instead, I sync files in selected folders to mega.nz, using their MEGAsync desktop app. mega provides 20GB storage free, and true zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption with all plans. Best of all, the only time I see any promos is when I go to my mega storage space using my browser, and even then, there's a single pop-up that's very easy to close. Even better for me, they have versions of the desktop app for both Windows and GNU/Linux distributions (including my distribution of choice, Arch-based Garuda KDE-Lite Linux). mega also offers several paid accounts with varying storage capacities that look fairly economical if more than 20GB storage is needed.

My Lenovo Legion 5 laptop has recently become my daily driver, so I decided to repurpose the ASUS-powered desktop system I assembled a few years ago as my Proxmox-powered home lab/server. My first Proxmox project was to create a Debian Trixi based storage container with access to the secondary 2TB Hybrid drive that's installed on the desktop with the intent of storing backup image files generated by the free community version of Veeam Agent so they're stored on another computer, and to satisfy the 3-2-1 backup rule. I've completed other Proxmox projects as well, but they're beyond the scope of this reply.

While a NAS device may empower a user to provide local Network storage that may also have the capacity to run a few other services, there are other, perhaps more flexible options that readers should consider as well.

I hope others find this useful,

Ernie