I extended the lifecycle of my 2013 vintage x64 QNAP (which lost support status around 2018 or 2019) by installing Ubuntu directly. The QNAP “firmware” was just an internal USB flash drive (DOM) that lived on a header that contained QNAP’s custom distro. There was a fully-featured standard UEFI that allows booting from the SATA devices.

I learned a lot in the process, but most important is that the special sauce NAS makers purport is usually years behind current versions.

The NAS finally bit the dust last year because of a design defect associated with Bay Trail systems that’s not limited to QNAP.