Can't you use the MATE desktop with your RHEL 7 clone? Or use it in with the next distro you'll use. It is fine, really, I have been using it since when I upgraded from Ubuntu 11.04 (Gnome 2 out of the box) to Mint 13. It is strongly maintained and feature complete as ever (only nag is in my recent version it had decimal megabytes and I changed that to binary megabytes with dconf-editor).

My comment had to do with using a distro that tracks Ubuntu LTS and not bothering with ppas, compilations, binary distributions except for a handful of stuff that I think I need.

I miss gaming under Windows 98, when everything just worked.
I don't want anymore to change motherboard, change OS, reconstitute a game library all for the diminishing returns of games looking slightly better and playing the same or worse than 10 years ago.

All the latest version of applications?
For me and people I know, the new versions of Inkscape and LibreOffice (or their point updates) will be in the OS's base packages in late May, 2016. For those who will bother updating the whole OS.

What's the cost of fitting 50 million plugs in the streets and parking lots?

What do you think cooking oil is? (sunflower, olive oil etc.). It's obtained with some pressure-based process but not with geological pressures. The energy density is very high. Can be burned in some diesel engines or be refined further into some "biodiesel".
Another technology is fire : while ruminants are chewing, belching and farting all day we developed a process of : chop wood, burn wood.

Of course if all fossil fuel mining stopped overnight, we would process to chop every tree we can find and raze any accessible land clear, then starve to death.

It's the Google billionaires I think who recently declared that computers and the internet are going to get embedded in everywhere and will become effectively invisible.
In fact, computers have been embedded or "hidden" in consumer appliances since the 80s and the old stuff was sometimes more invisible than now (camera with automatic settings, car, washing machine). But now it's "on the internet" or at least on a local network ; sensors and wireless are considerably cheaper.
Before I was born there was hype about that kind of stuff already but it was with serial lines and an 8-bit computer with 40 column text display.

It's like making a nazi supersoldier that shoots lightning, using suspiciously well conserved corpse parts from the 10th century and "Tesla" electric stuff.

How can you make it? By asking rhetorical questions, and ending your sentence with bangs! What if your readers already heard of balloons to map the microwaves over a decade ago? Didn't a balloon go up in the skies? We got some partial results before the WMAP probe picture!, improved from the ealier coarse picture made thanks to the earlier space-based COBE! But hold your breath, we're gonna write new articles and they will end up on slashdot! Bang!

Can you have a neighbour pick them up on foot?

I'm speechless. Kids already suffer spending all their lives in cars and in front of the television and other displays, which makes them socially inept and then eventually unemployed (the US is only transitioning now from full employment to mass unemployment, I bet this will be seen in the coming years/decades)
It's already bad enough. Legislating that kids are denied access to the streets (also called "outdoor") is insane.

With the mac book pros they took a lesson from netbooks and tablets, mass produce a one-size-fits-all model that you can't modify or upgrade. (minor spec differences at buy time, but that's it).
Its competition is somewhat the Surface Pro series.

create a playlist? Some of us are not logged in to youtube.

The bigger the star, the lower its lifetime. It only takes a few million years for a star to form, shine and then go supernova.

Bottom-of-the-barrel 'HDMI stick computer' might be it. You're saving on the HDMI cable at that point. Or even the software built into a low end TV with an unkwnown brand : a very recent one might come with a USB port and video playback / music playback / picture gallery functions. Seen a low end 32" like that, as weird as "low end" and "32\"" belonging in the same sentence may sound.

That is some unexpected news, as I was reading an interview of a French economic newspaper with this guy.
Let me chime in for a personal revendication which might be useful for the working or modest or youth classes. Counterstrike 1.x is lacking servers both in quantity and quality, a small few are nice but it is a pain to suffer 24/7 dust2, zombie mods (wtf?) and too many gun game servers. We should organize to provide community servers with good map rotations, good map voting (but servers without voting as in the good old times too) and ensure popular education with such classics as cs_militia, de_aztec (CS 1.5 version), de_prodigy, de_nuke (old version where you can climb on roof), de_ccble you name it. Even a hundred servers ought to require not many hardware resources these days, they probably could run on one box.

Counter-Strike 1.6 also allows anyone to compete as it will run on a modest PC and even with a really crappy OpenGL driver (linux) at high framerates, actually a low end CRT monitor at 85Hz is plenty fine there. Counter-Strike 1.5 is even less demanding, doesn't need Steam and can still be run though there's the little aspect of no CD key checking on the network (everyone gets 2^32 - 1 as the CD key)

No need to get in debt to buy recent PC parts!

It sure is.
For stationary images best would be for a "USB graphics card" to work (that's how I call a USB to HDMI adapter)
If an SBC comes with USB 3.0 then it's even better. Weirdly my googling turns up cheaper USB 3.0 adapters than 2.0 ones, like newer tech is more viable, newer, higher volume, cheaper.

But while the hardware is less overkill that way, cost of SBC + USB adapter gets nearer to the cheapest dual output PC (NUC, new fit-PC). Bigger hurdle : I have no clear idea of CPU, GPU and OS requirements.