Monthly Archives: April 2026

Being (obviously) a fan of Synology kit, I was very interested to read this article about ‘jailbreaking’ (sort of) non-native hardware and installing the Synology DSM to run across the compute and storage environments. It looks like compute requirements remain at the Synology low-end (which is good), while storage management is just absorbed into the DSM control panel (which is an excellent piece of device management functionality). This kind of open-sourcing is ground-breaking, especially when you look at how welded the Big Tech brands are to their own universe(s).

I feel it’s time to get serious. Time to stop dabbling with Linux and embrace it for real. With Microsoft’s bonkers business strategy of killing W10 (heck, I’m still irate they threw XP in the bin), forcing a lot of us to go out and spend over £1,000 (in my case) on a W11-capable machine which does everything *I* need it to. That’s bonkers as a business model and it would be equally bonkers for me to comply.

So I’ve been breathing life into a couple of old W-XP laptops I’ve had in storage. My logic is I’ll get the XP laptops up and running, perform all the right hardware checks a bunch of times, put some stress on the kit to see how it does, and then flatten XP and install Linux. Over the top of that I plan on installing an office suite (probably LibreOffice), and then taking it from there on a dual-use basis with this W10 laptop being used in parallel. Once I’m happy with the Linux laptop I’ll set the W10 machine aside and just use Linux for a while on the old machine. After a while (again), if I have no issues with the Linux/LibreOffice/etc setup, I’ll probably flatten the W10 machine, install the same packages and use that in anger, setting the former XP machine back into storage.

All I need to crack on with these things is a bunch of time.