Totally agree. It's why I set that up fucking eons ago. I am pretty sure that client was on Windows Server 2000 (I think that was the one you could just enter 25 licenses without any verification). It had to be in 2010 the server lost a power supply. That huge (((dell box))) power supply was like $300. They didn't spec it with redundant (before my time). Was gonna take like 7 days to get a power supply. I was like, windows 2000 is about end of life and I was like, no I am not bootlegging shit, and I am not selling them a new windows sever for 6-8k, waste of money, they won't pay for it, and they wont pay me time to do it all. So I went home, got my NAS and a fucking ZOTAC box that I had sitting doing nothing. restored all their files to the NAS. Installed Zentyal on the ZOTAC, added all 13 users, printers, groups shared it all, connected the NAS to Zentyal as AD authentication. Worked flawless. Had them order a NAS the same NAS (netgear at the time), it came a day or 3 later. "How long to migrate?" Migrate? It's done already (I kept the new NAS, they used my 3 month old NAS) and I never looked back. Zentyal is however stuck on V6.x as there is no upgrade path that works and I refuse to rebuild it, since it still works. Removed all internet access from the Zentyal. They have gone through 3 NAS drives since then. Now the workstations are simple win11 boxes that just run web based shit and a remote client for remote provider of Win11 Desktop services inside a HIPAA compliant tenent. It works for them, not for me. But it does reduce maintenance and cost. When we upgraded to win11, the owner bitched a little as we bought (before memory fuckery) Ryzen's for $329 with Win11 installed. So about $2500 out the door for hardware, and about 2500 for my time (cloned each machine the old fashioned way for that few) but billed them the 2.5ish hours for each machine even though it took less than 10 min to image them. I told them next time, we will load linux, with librewolf and the client app to get to the cloud desktop service. The old owner (dad) is tired and has given the place over to his ~30 yr old son. Son is smart, understands technology, just built a machine to game on linux. (well right as the memory was going up). He worked in big corp long enough to understand standardization and protecting the clients from fuckery, installs, and such. But to rebuild a entire office with 7 machines all up and running for 5k is a steal. When the owner bitched, I said, anyone else would come in and force you on Dell, Lenovo, HP at $1100 each. So you'd have 7700 in machines before they were usable.....Son had no issue with clones (amazon tiny boxes with ryzen 7's, 32GB ram/512gb) So to the old man I said, stop using old man brain, your office is working for 5k, you spend about 5k a fucking year on your IT services through me. I only do it because I like you guys, everyone else would be 4x that minimum. Not beating my chest, just saying there are so many ways to skin a cat and make shit work, but so many are Muh main stream, get windows server, get dell boxes, blah blah. fuck those guys.