If you believe SELinux to add minuscule extra security, you might want to read up on it a bit more. For me, it's perhaps the single most important security feature you can add to a modern OS, and it's hard to understate just how much extra security it buys you (although obviously that is dependent on the policies you put in place -- it is after all just a framework to allow you to specify security policies). And I'd argue that a desktop is far more in need of the protection it provides than servers (which realistically are pretty secure in the first place). A desktop has a larger attack surface than a server, and is exposed to far more malicious parts of the net than a server is.

I'm not "arguing for the sake of arguing" - I would really like for people to give this whole swap/no-swap thing a try

Oh, I have done. And I mostly agree with you. RAM is cheap, and it makes sense to take advantage of that. But no matter how much RAM you have, you have to give some thought to what you want to happen when you run out. Because you will. If letting the OOM killer nuke the process it thinks is most problematic is acceptable, then fine. But there are plenty of situations where that's not OK and sometimes, having some swap is the right answer. The whole idea of swap needing to be double the amount of RAM is nonsense and anyone doing such a thing in today's world need their head examining. But I tend to have a few hundred MB of swap on my servers and for me, that's a win over having no swap at all.

the evil part SElinux. I removed it

Possibly the worst decision you'll ever make when it comes to Unix sysadmin. SELinux is an absolute essential on any box I own. I can't see why anyone would trade security for a minor[1] performance gain.

[1] From my experience, 7% is a massive overstatement, and I'd say it's closer to 1% or 2%. But even if you're right and it's much more than that. Say 25% (which it isn't). I'd still say it's worth it...

Let's just agree to disagree

Fair enough. But you're right :-)

Plugins are probably the only thing keeping it alive.

Perhaps, although in this instance, they're the source of my problems. My main machine died, so I switched to using the spare (which brought with it a 32-bit to 64-bit transition). My home directory is NFS mounted, and so shared between both systems. Consequently, none of my plugins work, because no one at Mozilla thought about this:

LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /local/opt/x86/linux/flash_plugin-11.1.102.55/libflashplayer.so [/local/opt/x86/linux/flash_plugin-11.1.102.55/libflashplayer.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32]

It would have been trivial to put plugins into an architecture specific directory. This has been common practice in the sysadmin world for donkey's years. I've been doing it since the mid-90s, for example, and I learned about it from people that had been doing it for years before that. But no, Mozilla is written by people from a Windows background with no concept of such things.

Yep, Planet Rock is the only radio station I listen to. The problem is, they just don't play enough new music. There's a large amount of decent new rock and metal being released, but people aren't being exposed to it. They're certainly not going to be hearing it on mainstream radio stations, so if Planet Rock don't play it, who will? I'm happy to hear the classics, but I'd rather they mixed a bit more new stuff into the playlist as well. But ultimately, I'd rather listen to yet another repeat of Neil Young's "Like a hurricane" than whatever crap is on the other stations, so Planet Rock it is.

No, he didn't. If you believe he did, you might want to step back and take a long hard look at what was actually written, not how you chose to interpret it with your kneejerk reaction.

Sorry, but I not only think Stallman was completely right here, but I don't think anything he said could be construed as anything other than respectful. Lacking class? No, I just don't see it.

C++ is pretty pervasive and most companies have drunk the Kool Ade nowadays , so you can't get away from it.

Interesting. 10 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. These days, I'd say it's Java you can't get away from.

Also, what might be considered "a lot of money" in an Anglo-Saxon country may be just regular stuff here. You, see, I live in a very expensive geographical area

That's probably true for some areas, but not for most of South East England, and you'll struggle to find a more expensive place than London. The Mercer list is somewhat misleading, in that it measures purchasing power in US dollars, so currency fluctuations tend to dominate and skew the results (hence the ridiculous situation of Luanda topping the list in recent years). If you look at the cost of living in local currency, London and Moscow have been vying for the top spot for several years. Trust me, if you get a well paid job with a London based firm, you'll have no problems funding life in LÃtzebuerg. And you may not believe it, but yes, I'm positive you're good enough to do so. The current economic climate means that now is probably not the best time to be making a leap like that, but in a few years, I'd say you'd be fine.

Sure. I used to run such things daily when responsible for multi-user boxen at work. But on my home fileserver, there's only the two of us using it and I haven't bothered until now. Like I said, progress is getting me into bad habits. Disk space is cheap. The easy option is just to grow the filesystem when it fills up.