It's mid 2022, Ethereum is still PoW and motoring towards merge / PoS. Surviving testnets will be Sepolia - currently PoW - and Goerli. Ropsten will be merged and then deprecated, Rinkeby and Kovan won't be merged.
I want to "get ready" for some Sepolia testing pre- and post-merge. Sepolia will not have a public validator set; testing post-merge will be limited to running applications on it. As Sepolia is PoW, I can actually go mine myself some SepplETH. Here's how.
- Geth on Sepolia, Linux. This could absolutely be Windows, I just happen to have Linux tooling I like
- ethminer or t-rex, Windows, with an NVidia or AMD GPU. Mostly because the only GPU I have that can mine is in my Windows box