ace

Ah, I had one of those wireless sticks from Netgear as well, probably a different model but still a royal pain to get it working.
Luckily ndiswrapper has become a thing of the past nowadays.

Ended up getting a Kobo Elipsa 2E myself a while back, and it's been a real pleasure to use. There's no stupid device-level DRM on it to try and prevent me from actually using it for my reading, and the onboard storage is just a simple microSD so it's really easy to upgrade if I want to fit even more books.

KOReader has been a real treat to run on it, letting me sync books from my home NAS over WebDav, push books directly to it over scp, I've even been poking at a plugin to have it automatically sync books off of a local reading tracker I've written.

Seems to work with my personal setup at least, with two libraries - the default on ~/.local/share/steam, and one on /mnt/storage/steam - and Stardew Valley installed in the secondary storage library

You're lucky to not have to deal with some of this hardware then, because it really feels like there are manufacturers who are determined to rediscover as many solved problems as they possibly can.

Got to spend way too much time last year with a certain piece of HPC hardware that can sometimes finish booting, and then sit idle at the login prompt for almost half a minute before the onboard NIC finally decides to appear on the PCI bus.
The most 'amusing' part is that it does have the onboard NIC functional during boot, since it's a netbooted system. It just seems to go into some kind of hard reset when handing over to the OS.

Of course, that's really nothing compared to a couple of multi-socket storage servers we have, which sometime drop half the PCI bus on the floor when under certain kinds of load, requiring them to be unplugged from power entirely before the bus can be used again.

The predictable interface naming has solved a few issues at work, mainly in regards to when we have to work with expensive piece-of-shit (enterprise) systems, since they sometimes explode if your server changes interface names.
Normally wouldn't be an issue, but a bunch of our hardware - multiple vendors and all - initialize the onboard NIC pretty late, which causes them to switch position almost every other boot.

I've personally stopped caring about interface names nowadays though, I just use automation to shove NetworkManager onto the machine and use it to get a properly managed connection instead, so it can deal with all the stupid things that the hardware does.

Factorio is great, I'm also a fan of X4.

It's somewhat amusing how Itanium managed to completely miss the mark, and just how short its heyday was.

It's also somewhat amusing that I'm still today helping host a pair of HPE Itanium blades - and two two-node DEC Alpha servers - for OpenVMS development.