Veeam Backup is, in my opinion, one of the best free backup solutions available. The Linux version particularly shines with its ability to create snapshot backups of Ext4 partitions.

Unfortunately, the Linux version has a major drawback compared to its Windows counterpart: backup scheduling is extremely limited. You can only specify the day and hour for when backups should run. If the computer is asleep or powered off at that time, the backup won’t execute and, more importantly, won’t be rescheduled.

In the last few days, I’ve read several blog posts talking about how 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, and that’s a great thing. However, I think many of the headlines and posts on this topic should have a different title: “The Year Windows Annoyed Us Too Much.”

A History of “Verschlimmbesserung”

For years now, Microsoft has been steadily making its operating system worse through supposed “improvements” (Verschlimmbesserung). Windows Vista was a difficult step because many computers weren’t ready for it yet, but there was at least technical progress that was successfully concluded with Windows 7.

Through my work, I faced the problem that we wanted to authenticate users centrally via MySQL. This is not inherently a problem thanks to libnss-mysql and pam-mysql, but unfortunately, there is a lack of programs to manage users effectively.

Therefore, I have written tools that imitate the Linux programs user{add,mod,del} and group{add,mod,del} and published them as PAMMySQLTools on PyPI.