Well, for now the project has stalled the reason being Debian 13.
I installed Debian 13.1 on my existing scratch PC (fully replacing the Ubuntu 22.04 instance on that machine) and I have to say I am somewhat disappointed in the OS so far.
On my wife’s Ubuntu 22.04 and my Debian 12 instances, I have SMB shares to my Synology NAS using an entry in /etc/fstab to mount them. I then use the GNOME extension Desktop Icons NG (DING) to show the external drives on the desktop. This has worked perfectly for years.
However, Debian 13 refuses to perform in the same way. The drives are mounted (confirmed with mount -av) in terminal) so that is not the issue. This is seemingly not just a GNOME issue because I also tried the xfce and cinnamon desktop environments too and these didn’t work either.
The only thing I can put this down to at this stage is perhaps the Kernel 6.12.48+deb13-amd64 until I spin up a Live USB of another distro with GNOME DE using the same generic kernel to test it out.
The Debian forums are seemingly pretty quiet about 13 at the present - forums.debian.net seems to he constantly down of late with a the error “Problem loading page” and posting about this issue on Stack Unix & Linux has not generated any responses thus far.
So, for now at any rate, I’ll keep the money in my account until I find a satisfactory solution.
The Ubuntu 22.04 instance which this was going to replace is supported until Apr ‘27 so no pressure there, for now, anyway but a disappointment nonetheless in the meantime.