MystikIncarnate

I have a framework. The smaller one. I think they have two now. One of the older CPUs. Got it now than a year ago and it's been solid. Disclaimer: I don't run Linux on it, so IDK what that's like at the moment.

I've used most makes and models of laptops and desktops at some point for some duration... The hazards of being in IT.... I can't recommend anything from Microsoft. Simply too hard to do anything with when anything goes wrong and you're entirely at the mercy of MS for everything. I personally don't like Lenovo, I've had a few Lenovo's that have their PCIe slots locked to only accept specific device I.D.s in the firmware. I had to flash a hacked firmware to upgrade the wifi in one. It was an unpleasant experience. It did eventually work, but it was not fun. I also don't care for their keyboard layouts. That's been improved recently from what I've heard, I'm still equally not a fan of their systems.

I've had the most experience with HP and Dell, and for the most part they're very similar. Anything from their business lines will perform quite well though graphics may only be whatever comes integrated with the CPU.

I always push towards business systems because from what I've seen, they're more robust and usually don't break nearly as fast.

I'd think about getting an eGPU for gaming since no matter how powerful the system or it's GPU is, it will be massively outdated long before the system fails or becomes inoperable from age. With an eGPU external enclosure, you can upgrade any time you like to a desktop card for much cheaper than replacing the system. Most eGPU enclosures can also act as docking stations, providing power and even network and other things along with the graphics connection.

That's a lot of hardware talk though. I'm not going to tell you what to pick, I'm just making the best recommendations I can given the information available to me.

Good luck

Oh, I don't think it would, I'm just saying it would be good news if that were the case.

The only way that this could be good news, is if the entire c-suite was a part of that 1800.

Execs don't lose their morals.

People who become execs never had morals to begin with. It's not a job you go for because you value people.

You did so well until the last few sentences. Casually throwing everyone under the bus as idiots isn't a great move.

To be blunt, there's a lot of tech noobs out there that have always been, and will always be, fairly bad with technology. There's an even larger number that can't be bothered to pay attention or care about it. And finally, there's the enthusiasts and the tech savvy, most of whom are working in a tech related field (or want to). Special shout out to the enthusiasts who don't work in a tech field who are still quite savvy. But let's face it, the enthusiasts and the tech savvy are a minority. We are not their targets. Fact is, even if you're using Google's various services or Chrome or whatever, the tech literate are at least aware of what's happening, and a nontrivial number of them are here. Including you and I.

It then becomes our job to save others from themselves and get them away from the products looking to harm them. Throwing in the towel and calling everyone neaderthals isn't the way to accomplish this. If we all do our part, we can save those we care about from becoming yet another battery in the machine, with all their data flowing through one company. It's our duty.

For those that REALLY want to help, get involved in local politics and be the change. Help push regulation on the corporate shills that want it all. Whether that's running for office, or contacting your local representative or whatever, it's something that should be done. They shouldn't be allowed to just implement, what is essentially mass surveillance on the world without someone doing something about it. That's what the government is supposed to be there to do. I'll reserve my comments about how effective they've been in the past or how corrupt the whole system is, because that will vary from country to country. But bluntly, you can be that change by getting involved.

As to the comments about the general idiocy of the population of earth, I say this: do you know it all? Well, neither do they. Nobody does. Can you fix your car and then turn around and frame a shed from scratch? Me neither. Can you perform experiments to discover new and exciting things in quantum physics, then build a toaster from raw materials? Me neither. Can you fix your plumbing, then create a program in Pascal that does your taxes for you? Me neither. Everyone has their skills, talents and expertise. Simply because there is a large percentage of people whose expertise is not tech, doesn't, and shouldn't, invalidate their intelligence as an individual.

Check yourself, or the next time you have a problem you don't know how to fix, people might just throw in the towel on helping you.

I'm rewatching TNG and season 1 was pretty.... Off. Most of the characters seemed to be cheap knockoffs of their established personas. The most distinctive for me was Brent Spiner (Data), where, I can't put my finger on it, but he just seemed off the the data that I know and love.

I chalk it up to him coming off of being a comedic bit actor and he was still finding himself for the more dramatic role of data. He hadn't really nailed down the robotic methodology of his actions and speech that really makes data stand out. His responses were often quick, to the point of speaking over others, and his actions were fairly fluid and organic, which isn't Data at all.

It really didn't take long for him to work his way into the role (and into our hearts), I'm not criticising Brent by any stretch. He was and I'm sure still is, an incredible actor.... Judging by his fairly recent role reprising Data on Picard, he really hasn't lost his touch.

There's plenty of other things about season one that are odd, but I found Data to be the most notable. Still, worf was a lot more brooding, Picard seemed almost more timid, Riker didn't have a beard.... The only person from season one who I can point to with certainty and say that they didn't seem off from season 1 (compared to how I know the character), was Dr. Crusher. She was hitting it out of the park from day 1.

No matter the oddity, almost all of it was simply gone by the end of season one. I'm partway into season two now and I wouldn't be able to differentiate the characters on screen from any other season of the show, or from their movies.

350mb/s symmetrical is very adequate for most households. If you have any trouble with speed, it's likely a priority queue problem or an issue within the network. (Basically, router/firewall or access point - which can be interference or capacity issues mainly).... Provided your equipment isn't bogged down, eg, CPU isn't fast enough to keep up. The best way to know on that last point is to check reviews where they test throughput. Having a gigabit ethernet port is nice, but if the router can only handle 200mb/s of traffic, you're going to have a bad time.

Starting from the top. Make sure your ISP will let you run in bridged mode. This can significantly reduce the work it needs to do, and increase the latency of requests (aka, ping time). Pfsense is very common, but I find it a bit cumbersome and I prefer opnsense myself. Try one, try the other... You don't even need to use it as your router, just load it up on a spare or old PC and go poke around the user interface... See if you can find all the settings for your internet connection, LAN connection, NAT/port forwarding, etc. Pretty much anything you would normally want to touch. See what you prefer. I find the user interfaces are some of the biggest differences between the two. For non-open source, there's some cheap but good vendors like mikrotik, but mikrotik tends to have a pretty steep learning curve, so buyer beware on that ubiquiti has some good options for small home environments too, like the UDR, which has all the fixings of a typical all in one router (switch, access point, etc) plus a ubiquiti controller, and it's quite capable. I like the UDR because it's not expensive (around $200) and has two PoE ports (out of the four total ports). This means you can add two access points to it. Throwing that together with a U6 access point for extending your wireless is a good solution and should come in under your $500 budget. The extra access point (or two, if you wish) will join the controller and work with the integrated ap, providing seamless roaming, as long as you turn on the appropriate settings. If you need more ports, there's a lot of ubiquiti switches to choose from that are well priced, so you can scale out from there if you want.

As far as pfsense/opnsense goes, it can be installed on anything with at least two ethernet ports. You can go pick up a small form factor off-lease workstation for a couple hundred, and drop in a second hand business/server grade ethernet card from eBay, and it will massively outperform the 1Gb/s ethernet interfaces.

If you want to go more piecemeal about it with pfsense/opnsense, there's plenty of good PoE gigabit switches out there, especially used business switches from HPE (I like the "1920s" model) or Aruba, even Cisco and juniper. Switches are usually pretty bullet proof unless you really abuse them, but companies don't like to have out of warranty stuff in their network, so the units get flooded onto the secondary markets after a while. PoE is good if you don't want to run power to access points, though you can also use PoE injectors... Speaking of access points, my favorite non-ubiquiti access point for the home is the Aruba instant-on series. They're managed from a free cloud portal, and I have yet to find a situation where they would do a great job. The only pinch is that when the internet goes down, you lose any ability to manage them. They're otherwise perfect. A step up from that (and not to be mistaken for it) is the Aruba instant series; they're a lot more expensive but locally managed and have a lot more settings.... It can be a lot more difficult to get up and running with the instant series if you're not completely familiar with networking, so buyer beware here too.

If your place is smaller and you only need one access point, the best option I've found, for price and performance is enGenius. The locally managed ones.... I haven't kept up with their product line, but I know they were moving to cloud management for most of their stuff. So finding the right access point may be a bit of a challenge. Also, I've used their access point systems (for multiple access points) and found it lacking, granted, that was several years ago now, so hopefully things improved, but I would recommend the Aruba instant-on for multiple access point systems over enGenius any day of the week. enGenius has the stand alone access point crown to me though.

For WiFi 6/6e/7, it will depend on your situation. If you're in a high density environment, you may get benefit from 6e/7.... If you're in the suburbs or in a more rural situation, 6 is going to be fine. Just make sure you're buying dual band access points. The big benefit for 6e is that you gain access to the 6Ghz band, which is only really helpful if your local 5Ghz band is overcrowded, like in the case of a high-rise apartment (even then, it may not be all too helpful), and WiFi 7 builds on this with some multiple access performance improvements as the key features. Meaning fewer slowdowns from many things on the WiFi at once. WiFi 6 already has some multiple access improvements, most notably MU-MIMO, so, I wouldn't worry about it too much. 6e is going to simply reduce the chances that you have to share a 5/6Ghz channel with anyone else. The issue with 6ghz is that not all devices support it (laptops, cellphones, etc), and certainly no electronics (IoT stuff, printers, TVs, etc) will support it.

Personally, if you're not into networking as a hobby or a full time job, then I'd usually point you at the ubiquiti UDR, and add one or two access points depending on coverage requirements. Either going for the U6+ (if you absolutely need to save money), the U6 pro for ceiling mount, or the U6 mesh if you need to plug it in and place it on a surface (The mesh is a bit more money due to it being so compact). For more hardwired ports, if you want more access points or something, maybe the Lite 8 PoE.... There's also the flex mini if you only need a handful of extra ports.

If you want something more challenging, using an opnsense router of custom built off the shelf computer parts is a good option, paired with an eBay find of a HPE 1920s with PoE and a couple of Aruba instant-on AP22's or something would be spectacular, but a bit more involved, and likely a bit more pricy, since I'm not sure how well the instant-on AP's fare in secondary markets (I'm not sure if Aruba will let you register a used access point into the cloud controller).

The ubiquiti solution has legs but you'll be limited by the fact that it only has 1Gbps ports... It's powerful enough that you can fully use those ports, but it will never go faster than 1G.

I hope that helps. I know it's a lot of information to process. I don't know your situation and I can be much more specific about what to use without getting into a lot of detail about your situation. I don't want you to have to post that information publically on the internet, so I wanted to give you the information to make an informed decision. I hope I have done that, and I wish you the best of luck with your future network.

Fun story: I purchased several wireless access points from an eBay seller, years back, and when I brought them online, our geolocation services on all our phones thought we were several hundred miles away from where we lived for many months. I assume the bssid data was feeding the incongruency.

After a few months, however, whatever database was feeding our devices with bad geolocation data, was updated, and we were once again "located" in the correct spot.

The accuracy of these systems is incredible, it will actually use, not only your own bssid, but also that of complete strangers to try to figure out where you are without turning on GPS. If your personal bssid is weak but your neighbors bssid is stronger, it will adjust your position based on the relative signal strength of each bssid that is detected. In the same way triangulation works with most radio signals.

I've seen such systems estimate, with a fair amount of accuracy, client location data on a floorplan where there are a few dozen access points in the space.... So it works both ways. In that case I was part of a team at a job where the client had a couple thousand square feet of floor space, and about 12-15 access points to blanket the space in coverage. We could, with some degree of accuracy, follow the location of someone as they moved through the space; knowing where they spent most of their time, and what services in the space were utilized by the guest.

.... It was a mid-sized airport.

Everything. Basically, if it's not nailed down, they want to take it.

The short list of most common data taken would be app usage stats, not necessarily just for the app in question (eg, tiktok may pull data on how many hours of screen time other apps get, like YouTube or Instagram or literally anything else), GPS info, data about how often you handle your phone (from accelerometer readings), wifi networks including the bssid (mac address) of your router, which cannot be easily changed or masked, sometimes even data from your mic when you're not using the phone at all.

They know when you're sleeping, they know when you're awake, they know when you've been bad or good.... Oh wait, that last bit is Santa... Isn't it?

Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if a few are bold enough to upload your pictures regardless of if you are posting the images, your browser history, security, device make/model, storage of your device, the list of files in storage, text messages...

Basically, anything that might help them identify you, what you do, where you work, when you work, how you travel, whether you're in a relationship, how happy you are in that relationship and how long it has been going on... Anything that might lead them to provide more targeted ads. Been in a relationship for a while and you seem happy? Check out these engagement rings. Already married? Here's some ads about parent stuff. Even something as simple as, hey, you're single and it's February, why not try Tinder or Grindr, or (insert app for your preference here).

They want to know everything there is to know so they can get you to buy more crap you probably don't need, for more than it's worth, and keep that economic gravy train rolling.

Ehhh. Let him keep it. Honestly, he had the patience to do it and nobody clued in for so long that in this case, he won.

This is the way.

Oh yeah, having headroom for microbursts is great, and factors into the precieved speed of the connection. It's a requirement for most users to have that headroom to make the connection feel fast. But a lot more goes into the apparent "speed" of the connection than that. Having quick DNS and high-speed routing to the wireline internet connection is also important, but harder for most to grasp what will actually achieve that goal versus other products.

The main thing is that headroom for burst traffic is mostly shared, since the channel gets used and then freed almost as fast. In this way, others can burst traffic into the channel shortly afterwards, with no detrimental effect.

The headroom doesn't need to be gigabits of capability in most cases. 300-450mbps is often very sufficient and may be more than what is required, depending on the usage.