every Windows installation slows down with usage, to the point of requiring to be formatted

Not neccessarily. I made a maintenance procedure clearing temporary files and registry with ccleaner and MyDefrag to organize files on disk for our customers and it solves most slowdown by far (excluding the usual malware toolbars etc.)
That eliminated most re-installs and uneccesary expenses. Not to mention losing preferences.

What sort perverted things are you up to on that 'puter of yours?

I could tell you, but then you'd get a visit from people with a very dark fashion sense.

Then again, you might be lucky and get psychologically scarred for life.

Windows 8.1 can run on a 16 GB partition with 1 GB of ram

Debian testing, Libreoffice, Eclipse, GIMP, Iceweasel, a whole bunch of other programs and utilities; 10G used on disk (including 2.3G home directory), about 1G RAM actively used of 3, the rest is cache.

No matter how you look at it, Microsoft has never been in the lean and mean camp. Neither with OS nor Office, database, virtualisation software.
Maybe open source development fosters a more efficient use of hardware by its nature?

That makes the difference between those who can do a job, and those who are really good at it.

The latter are rare to find.

Just read the summary at the link, but it feels to me like it's the plot of a horror B movie.
The protagonists seem to be making the same dumb choices the teenagers do in the haunted house that gets them killed.
Maybe it's good, but the summary didn't entice me to look further into it.

I don't use those one-stop-shop distros like Ubuntu, Fedora,etc.. I prefer to start with a clean distro and only add what I want to (Debian, fluxbox, links2, xmms). That's what I love about the *nixes.
And that's why I make a more concious effort on my installations which (time=money)!=cheapskate, which was my point to the parent.
Since running a simple, clean desktop I can never get comfortable using Windows (desktop nor server).

If by cheapskate you mean taking effort to decide on a distro, desktop environment and applications, create installation media and install from scratch making sure all hardware is supported to create a comfortable computing experience, yeah, I guess I'm one of those cheapskates.

That's why I think it only works in static environments. Back when I set up the first Windows 2003 terminal server farm I used the builtin ability to restrict access to only those programs allowed to run.

Unfortunately in reality most offices have users with full access to their PC's (because they feel entitled to it) or at least their profile so they can run whatever they want. The only thing blocking their behaviour is up-to-date anti-virus software.

On the Info security blog he mentions that it's the kernel which recognises executable files.

So, how does the kernel know which executables are legit to run?
If I want to run my CreateDancingBunniesDrawingsIn0Days.exe I would give it permission just like the new update from my office suite because I don't know any better. Unless there is a program which recognises the executable as malware and warns me. Something that gets updates hourly from a central source of known malware maybe?
Better yet, we need something where we allow programs only specific access to resources. Including a buffer for disk access that can be flushed or written to disk after confirmation.
I doubt it'll fit in 100KB though.

Exactly. A warehouse is nothing but a physical database.
Goods are placed and retrieved at specific locations. If something's wrong a manual check and correction can be done, or maybe have one or two robots with good visual recognition randomly check locations and the contents for correctness.

Static advertising.

No more audiovisually distracting intrusive advertising burning bandwidth and CPU to peddle things you've already bought or looked into.
Newspapers and magazines had people managing advertising themselves, picking relevant products and the way it's presented. Why can't websites manage it like they do and take responsibility for it?

Only after a page doesn't work in a text browser.

I use links2 as my main browser and only use Iceweasel+NoScript if the page is interesting enough to read. Haven't used an adblocker in a while since NoScript seems to work well enough for me.

For this I still keep going back to XMMS (the original). Tried the various successors but it felt like there were less features and keyboard controls with these.

I only need to find the right file to load .flac files, but then again almost everything is ripped to ogg vorbis q10 anyway.

I don't think it's his handling of Ubuntu but more that Ubuntu (which is just Debian testing + unstable) can do weird things.

I suggest running Debian stable (although testing and even unstable run fine here) with the stable, backported, contrib and non-free packages first.
When you're comfortable with that setup installing the latest software directly (outside the Debian repositories) from source/.deb packages is next. This should give you up-to-date software like with Arch.

E17 isn't available right now in the Debian repository, but I suggest looking at fluxbox as it keeps all the distraction away from the desktop and provides a simple way to run programs (which is what's it all about).
As an alternative look into FreeBSD, my first open source server/desktop that I used.

I think your answers are wrong.

1) All the more reason to encrypt stuff, although it would take more than that.
2) Protect your privacy in the case of hardware getting stolen.
3) Because you can is a very good reason (see #2).

I'm looking into adding this extra layer of protection to laptops and external disks for our customers as an option.