Okay, I’ve been watching lots of YouTube videos about switches and I’ve just made myself more confused. Managed versus unmanaged seems to be having a GUI versus not having a GUI, but why would anyone want a GUI on a switch? Shouldn’t your router do that? Also, a switch is like a tube station for local traffic, essentially an extension lead, so why do some have fans?
There is only one router on your network. It routes traffic from one machine to another. This is typically also the gateway, and it only has so many ports.
If you want more physical devices connected to your network, you’d need switches to fan out your network.
Un-managed switches essentially takes packets from one port and pass them through another port, easy peasy, nothing fancy.
Managed switches, however, can do more than just take packet from one port, then push it out to the other side. You can set up link aggregation for example, allowing more throughput by using two or more ports to go to the same destination (maybe for example a central file server). You can have L2 vs L3 switches so they route differently. You can have multiple paths to reach another machine, for redundancy but must implement STP to prevent broadcast loops etc.
Once your network grows larger than just Internet for a couple of desktops, it gets a lot more interesting.