Eaton are probably the best out there. In my experience battery last between 3 and 4 years.

An new AMD Laptop APU will outperform Intel in every metric. I can only recommend T14 & T14S but any other Thinkpad will be ok.

Anything other than QNAP.

I believe this is best alternative at the moment for my next Proxmox build, threadripper is out reach for me and Ryzen doesn’t have the PCI lanes or memory channels. So I guess my best option is a 7542 + Supermicro MB + 128G for about $1,000.

Eaton is my recommendation. Look at the 5S1500 (modified sinewave) or 5SC1500. They all work with NUT. I have one of my UPS connected to a Raspberry PI Zero with NUT. And my servers NUT clients are scheduled to shutdown after a 2min outage and my NAS after 4min. I can also monitor the UPS from Home Assistant and receive notifications on my phone each time the UPS goes OB or OL.

https://www.eaton.com/content/dam/eaton/products/backup-power-ups-surge-it-power-distribution/backup-power-ups/eaton-5-series-ups-brochure-br153013en-lr.pdf

Any specific reason to move from a Mikrotik to OPNsense?

I think this is the best homelab router out there. If you are new to Mikrotik there is definitely a steep learning curve.

Openwrt is fairly good too, but I think documentation can be lacking and confusing for some edge applications. My other concerns with openwrt is performance since it is compatible with a wide variety of hardware is difficult to know how it will perform without testing it.

Unfortunately this is so true. Even my family believe that I’m weird just because I have brought this concern few times.

I was on the edge, but this event with Halli showed clearly that Elon is not right person to lead Twitter.