Okay so I am thoroughly confused, and I guess I can now see the appeal of Thunderbolt.

It was always a sort of a dream for me to build a small homelab for myself - nothing fancy, just a router with openwrt, maybe a small yet powerful-ish PC for all the side projects I want to try, so it can do VM, containers etc. I also plan to use it as a small NAS. Just to start out and experiment.

I don’t want to all out and buy things before I understand things, so have been looking at things I already have.

My laptop has a USB C 3.2 Gen 2 port. I plan to build a system with one too. I realized I can’t just connect them both with a USB cable and expect something to happen. Thunderbolt apparently supports negotiating a 10Gig link b/w the computers, and that would be perfect for my small NAS!

I want to do that, but being a ryzen build, both my current laptop and my planned nas build, none have thunderbolt. How do I get this to work without adding 10G network gear? I know I can buy 10G adapters etc but I don’t want to go down that route, as this, for me, feels exponentially easier, and definitely less expensive, less cables, less mess. And the varying “tiers” of support in 3.2 gen2 just adds to my confusion.

Is it even possible? If so, what do I need? I can’t put in a TB4 card in the nas if the mobo does not have the JTBT header apparently, leaving me with USB4. Will my laptop and a USB4 nas-pc work?

I was thinking I’ll get 2 USBC to ethernet adapters, connect them with an ethernet cable, and call it a day. In my head it should work irrespective. Advice? Hopefully when both my devices are USB4, I can just connect them and it should “just work”, right?