The most annoying issue I have with my Synology is that when I accidentally pulled out the power cord, it seems to have forgotten its configuration. Only Synology support knows the commands required to get it all up and running, they sorted it remotely, BUT, I rebooted it and it promptly forgot its settings. They sorted it AGAIN, but said only way to sort it is to reformat and rebuild.

If it can be restored to normal functionality with a few commands, surely they should be able to save the configuration for subsequent reboots?

No data was lost, btw.

Synology's implementation of BTRFS is rocksolid, in my experience. This guy [1] tried to break it and couldn't.

[1] https://daltondur.st/syno_btrfs_1/

I’ve been incredibly happy with my Synology products FWIW. BTRFS/SHR have been rock solid.

The hardware is very nice indeed, and the software is smooth as well.

What has irritated me in the past was that they sometimes took very long to fix vulnerabilities [1].

[1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/11138/Synology.html

What is getting me is the EOL bits they have done with some of their HW. It is a NAS. I can see EOL on parts of the stuff they add. But the fileshare bits? That is really the only reason I bought the thing. Does anyone know any alt distros to replace theirs?

I think Synology runs BTRFS on top of LVM, so that may mitigate some of the issues.

Synology SHR is btrfs (or ext4) on top of LVM and MD. MD is used for redundancy. LVM is used to aggregate multiple MD arrays into a volume group and to allow creating one or move volumes from that volume group.