Hoping that this leads to a standard which benefits all parties. USB type standard for electric cars equalling a standard nozzle type for combustion cars.

A Thunderbolt cable will handle the required bandwidth from the dock to the laptop.

Your phone, do you expect to pass data via the phone and your laptop (eg photos/videos?) If you do then a USB 3.2 10 Gbps cable would be the most you would need (€25), costs may stear you towards a simple charging cable something around 60w (€10) would be ample BUT you phone may not fast charge due to Samsung’s charging preference.

HDMI 2.1 would be ample for a your monitor (4k resolution at 120fps) and the cost difference between this (€13) and 2.0 (€10) is minimal nowerdays

Ethernet is easy, CAT5e in the colour/length of your choice would supply the potential max 2.5gb Ethernet port you have (€8 for 10meters). Higher the CAT rating the more costly the cable.

Additional Thunderbolt ports would be best used/reserved for high-speed external storage or even a gaming GPU.

The fact your asking about these items shows you should be pretty much covered for the next few years of ‘fitire proofing’

Running DVB-S2 for many years and SAT>IP (think of it as Satellite decoding to rstp) seems to be the way. I’ve not thought about a smaller PC to host my current card and welcome your suggestion. I’d github’d minisatip a few weeks ago and the penny didn’t drop!

I had planned to go for an Enigma2 based device and go from there.

What’s the bigger opinion on this. Is MS pushing onPrem Exchange as rotten apple to encourage the shift to 365 or are they genuinely pushing this info out for Administration awareness?

I would assume at this point any Orgs using onPrem are needing the services and thus assume it’s for awareness?

This guy fibers!

Docker is a method of virtualization on an application level.

You host a container platform on your computer and this allows you to utilise containers.

Example of Containers are applications such as

Plex Sonarr Pihole

Each container is a ‘complete’ platform with all the dependencies included - your container platform supplies Disk/CPU/Ram and network for the Container to function.

Containers can be based on operating systems that are different to your computer.

Using containers mean you have a very easy way of trying an Application without installing to your native operating system.

Let us know if you have a NAS /PC /Server and we can tailor the answer further.