I have this problem more frequently with desktops and servers during power outages.

What do you mean by init? There's still a binary called init if that's what you want. And RHEL 6 used Upstart, but I don't know if that's more init than Systemd. So yes in theory you can since you have access to the source code and can modify it any way you want. This will be cumbersome in practice.

That's true, although I would suggest that you also don't improperly shut down your laptop. :-)

It's Gnome 3.8, which is a good desktop in my opinion. But you take some time should try it out yourself.

Any file system should be fine. Go with the default if you're not sure you want something else.

It is 3.10. But keep in mind that this is only where Red Hat essentially forked their version. Each minor release adds major changes to the kernel, including both hardware support and new features.

Because RHEL includes the source code, which can be kind of an important feature. But apart from that Solaris should be fine. They lost a lost of talent during the Oracle takeover, and I have a number of ZFS support incidents due to that; but to be honest things have been much better starting about a year ago.

The kernel package in particular is one of the things that Red Hat changes a lot, but usually only between minor releases. A small addition such as KVM was introduced in 5.2 for example.

It's much easier to handle large scale automation when you're using separate files.

Maybe I'm missing something but what good is the libvirt driver if you don't have anything to connect it to?

This is where containers is a good idea. Use RHEL as a stable base system and run something like Fedora in a container for the few apps that need it.

I was going to the FTP site to look at the sources, but apparently they have moved.

That's a bit cool actually.

Debian is not always that fast. Just take Gnome for example, sid is still on 3.8 which is getting kind of old by now. And not to mention that they are still in the process of switching to systemd. Debian is great, but the stable release is usually what you want and then you're back in RHEL territory.

Absolutely.

There's a lot of people that uses Linux that does not care about that, most of them using Android.

Wget can be built for either OpenSSL or GnuTLS.