In some cases they look for generic virtual hw devices, in other cases things like available cpu flags or BIOS version.
There are ways to hide it though:
https://github.com/zhaodice/qemu-anti-detection
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/how-do-i-hide-the-fact-to-windows-that-it-runs-in-a-vm.115627/

No idea to be honest, been a long time since I ran Windows at home.

Can always use the Windows 10 LTSC 2021 iso to create the Windows To Go. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-10-enterprise
Getting a proper license is gonna be impossible as a private consumer though, or well you can probably find someone selling the product keys online for cheap but that isn’t a real sales channel and it could suddenly become deactivated by Microsoft. I can find sites illegally selling them for as low as $14 when doing a quick search.

The real way to get the license is to sign up for their Volume Licensing Program.
Windows Enterprise LTSC is available in the per-user and per-device model, depending on the Volume Licensing program through which it’s acquired.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-licensing#windows-desktop-offerings-available-through-commercial-licensing
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/vlsc-faqs-home-page

Using Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) and a fast USB thumbdrive, such as Kingston DataTraveler Max - https://www.storagereview.com/review/kingston-datatraveler-max-review, you can make a “Windows To Go” installation.

Now you have a Windows install that you can boot directly from the thumbdrive when the need arise.
Perfect for booting up if your bios can’t updated directly from the usb drive and forces you into Windows, or to run that one software you can’t replace just yet and that refuses your attempts to run with wine.

Just make sure that it’s an ssd usb thumbdrive or it’s gonna be too slow to be any use.

Personally I’ve upvoted the replies as they keep a relevant and interesting discussion going.

I believe that both proprietary non-free systems and fully free systems can exist and that having licensing alternatives like GPL, LGPL and MIT gives the developer options for specifying how their software is to be used.

The movement towards using MIT or LGPL instead of the full GPL for libraries thus allowing the developers using the libraries the freedom to choose what license their software should use is one I can stand behind.

If someone builds a FLOSS turbotax competitor and don’t want anyone to use their hard work and fork it into a commercial and proprietary product then I believe there should be a license for that.
If they rather earn money from it and copyrights their code instead that is also their prerogative.
The middle-ground where they create a free turbotax competitor with a license that allows others to fork it into a proprietary software should also be possible - although I personally don’t see the allure.

That question is kind a rabbit hole and not one I feel confident in going down.

Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
The real world implications of non-free software is that other’s can’t run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

I like having computing alternatives that are free from corporate control and believe that the hardliners like FSF helps us keep those alternatives alive. I realise that those alternatives are in many ways worse and that a lot of hardware today requires the vendor blobs to work. When/If corporations push their control even further I want those alternatives to be around.

And you really should pay for winrar. ;-)

Not in this case, the tests they’re running doesn’t need the vendor blobs in those testing folders.

Generally I agree with Debians changes to include nonfree firmware in the default images and making the “completely free” images the non-default version. I do think maintaining and having completely free distro versions to be a good thing though.

The whole situation is really unnecessary because none of the things that we’re testing really requires those vendor blobs.
We’re just testing the basic vboot and CBFS structures in those images, the file contents are not really relevant as long as they match the signatures.
So I think the easiest option here is to just remove the offending CBFS files from those images / overwrite the offending FMAP sections with zeroes.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/374385985

In this case the binaries with the nonfree software seem be completely unnecessary, so why not keep it free?

https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/coreboot@coreboot.org/thread/6JI7KTJ3QVK6Q5BLNWREX2IBVZP7GCLP/

They were put there for some testing and from their mailing list it sounds like it will be removed as it’s unnecessary.

Apologies that this has caused problems for you.
This is just some old test data used to confirm that the parser in the command line utility works, and I don’t think anyone thought about the redistribution legality implications of putting those images into the repo.
I agree that it’s not a good situation and we should try to fix it.

There is no real reason for these binaries to be in those test fixtures — the point of the tests is just to verify parsing for vboot data structures, the actual contents of the file are not really relevant.

• Julius Werner, member of the Advisory Group

https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/coreboot@coreboot.org/thread/6JI7KTJ3QVK6Q5BLNWREX2IBVZP7GCLP/

edit: “there is a general advisory committee made up of any individuals who wish to help out and discuss their thoughts with the leadership board. This is done at bi-weekly meetings, which all members of the project are invited to attend and contribute.”
https://coreboot.org/leadership.html

The first thing to check is whether you can install your CAD software on a virtual machine with your current license. If you have good internet at home and already own a CAD machine then it might be easier to setup VPN access and remote control that machine for your Windows needs. Sunshine/Moonlight works good if you have the bandwidth for it.

The safe way would be to buy an existing NAS solution, such as a Synology DS423+, don’t forget that you want to buy at least one USB Drive that the NAS can put backups on if the data is valuable and/or unique to you (can’t redownload the photos from Vacation Summer 2024) and you want to run your NAS disks redundantly (mirrored in some way, f.e. RAID10).

If you want to expand your home lab services and the NAS can’t handle the cpu/ram requirements you can still often use the NAS as a bind mount and keep it as your storage location even when you add a second computer that runs the actual services. This is the way many traditional data centres work, with Compute and Storage separated into different hardware.

Personally I run everything virtualized in a Debian kvm/qemu server, including my gaming fedora vm with vfio gpu passthrough. For me it was a lot of fun learning to setup vfio passthrough and the like but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you do it because you’re curious and doing it that way has a value in itself.
There’s a lot of packaged hypervisor solutions, such as Proxmox, that makes it easier to get started with virtualization right away and already have builtin backup solutions and so on.

Interesting that Toshiba/Seagate has best 16TB stats and WDC bad ones in comparison, but for 14TB it’s reversed. My homelab disks apparently has 0.71% risk of dying after 22 months (seagate exos x16 st16000nm001g).
edit: WDC does good in 16TB too, their only outlier there could be due to low number of disks in deive count. And the same is true when checking total no of disks for 14TB.

I can only be another “everyone” and say go for a Synology. If you wanna run services on your NAS then the DSM is a godsend. The 423+ sounds like a good fit, might wanna grab a RAM upgrade for it though.

edit: As you mentioned Jellyfin - if you wanna stream video you definitely want the 423+ and not the 923+ as the AMD Ryzen R1600 lacks GPU to transcode video streams.

Uncertain if it has all the customization you want, but check out ArcMenu for GNOME
https://github.com/tau-OS/tau-arcmenu?tab=readme-ov-file
https://gitlab.com/arcmenu/ArcMenu

https://fwupd.org would be the way.
https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd

edit: Read your cross post. Using an USB would be the way then, or booting Windows.

I stand corrected, .NET Core is open source and uses the MIT License.

I stand corrected, .NET Core is open source and uses the MIT License.

As in
“We’ve finished taking all we need from the Mono project and implemented it into our proprietary .NET implementation for Linux, Android and iOS. Instead of getting flack for killing off Mono (which is open source and would’ve been forked anyways) we graciously give this old husk to the Wine project. We recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET. kthnxbye!”

Good thing that it went to Wine I guess, as they do lots of work to get old Windows programs up and running in Linux and that often involves Mono.

“We’ve finished taking all we need from the Mono project and implemented it into our proprietary .NET implementation for Linux, Android and iOS. Instead of getting flack for killing off Mono (which is open source and would’ve been forked anyways) we graciously give this old husk to the Wine project. We recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET. kthnxbye!”

Good thing that it went to Wine I guess, as they do lots of work to get old Windows programs up and running in Linux and that often involves Mono.