Some people enjoy pain and suffering too.

Yup, you don't understand mature software. That's ok, most people in tech don't. As for the media? Slipstream the latest SP into your ISO and you're done. I have installed XP previously in a Xen DomU and itt' drop dead easy. 7 is a "just ok" replacement and only by virtue of Vista being so bad.

I had done all of the above in AVG Firewall on Windows, and it was very easy to do.

That's the part I actually doubt. All firewalls configured by normal users I've seen in my lifetime were so much of a mess, that they had more holes than a swiss cheese on were so strict they became unusable
I'm also quite surprised about "ranges known to be used by malware, marketers, etc...". If those were really even halfway public knowledge, there would be no malware of "marketing" problem on the Internet.
This one should get his medication, and think his strategy over.

Beta is kinda awkward, but not as bad as the haters say. Basically, same shit different day. Kinda expected, I know.

[No text here]

How is that going to work in a house that has abysmal cell reception? I build a new house and due to the higher grade isolation (I think, it's a guess. May be the floor heating too, that's a lot of water), cell reception is extremely bad. Outside, it's fine. Of course, I didn't know this and my alarm system is GSM based. They had to install the system under the roof, because it the basement it simply wouldn't work.

So, I assume something like the Ferrari Mondial was not a sports car when you were a kid?

There is a reason why "anal" is part of "analytical" :-P

Isn't it horrible to be corrected by a non-native speaker? ;-)

"plane MacBook"... Definitely good at marketing if you need MacBooks specifically for planes! MacBooks on a Plaaaaane!

Yes, only if I want to access *.shark on the internet. That kinda sucks no? Blacking out a whole subsection of the internet because they now suddenly have gTLD that are words which you could freely use before. You're not missing anything. It's just that is someone buys that, I'll have to give up using it locally, or I blackout a part of the Internet. My users (well, okay, in this case only my wife.... but you get the point) won't like that.

These generic TLDs were not a good idea, not now, not never...

I need to read better. You understood fully what I meant... The possibility of a clash is real and very very annoying.

Why? Because it's only authoritative for the local domain of course. I do also have public authoritative DNS servers, but I don't want them to serve private IP addresses. So, at home my domain is called simply "sharks" (buying that goes like, what? 50k€). It is not public, but authoritative locally. Now, of course, I could take one of the domains I own, and use that. I don't really like that idea. My hosts are named after shark species, so you have mako.sharks, hammerhead.sharks, etc... mako.jawtheshark.com really isn't the same.

Perhaps it makes it slightly clearer. Contrary to popular belief, an authoritative server does not need to be authoritative for the public internet. Locally is just fine. Just don't use stuff that clashes with the public DNS system.

if the other LAN members communicate with "linux.home" an entry is supposed to be already present in "hosts" (like) files

Host files? Are you serious? Nobody outside the tech world uses those and even the techs don't use it except for very very specific cases. For the normal users there is DNS-SD (Zeroconf) and anybody more technical is better off simply setting up a DNS server with authoritative zone for the local network (Which is why I hate these new TLDs... My domain of choice might be sold someday and I'll have to give it up using locally... having to use the boring .local or .home), with the added benefit of having a real DNS server on site becoming totally independent of the ISP DNS (well, unless you want to make a forwarding one).

This is a problem of their making. The generic TLDs shouldn't ever have been introduced.