Published May 7, 2026, 11:58 AM EDT Umair Khurshid is a technology writer and developer with a strong focus on Linux, FreeBSD, cloud infrastructure, and automation. Before focusing on writing, Umair worked as a developer and DevOps engineer building and automating cloud-native systems. An older desktop had been in use for a while. It still worked fine for everyday tasks, but the connectivity situation had degraded. The machine was tied to Ethernet through a slightly awkward setup, and Bluetooth support came from one of those tiny USB dongles. At some point, the Bluetooth dongle started misbehaving. The mouse would randomly disconnect, audio on wireless headphones would stutter, and reconnecting devices meant regularly toggling through settings and hoping for the best. Replacing the dongle would have been the obvious fix. Instead, I ended up using the empty PCIe slot that had been sitting there doing nothing for years. It’s my sister’s computer, by the way. I’m just the one who got handed the screwdriver.…