This is not a base OS configuration problem. It's a personal taste of working environment problem, especially for your environment's web server needs.

So look to service configuration tools, like cfengine, puppet, chef, or any of the dozens of other tools that already have setups for this.

You will hear of such users now, I think. Gnome has become much too large to be reliable or even stable anymore I have clients preferring to use CygWin's X windows, and ssh access to X applications, rather than use current Linux releases and deal with the excessive bloat of Gnome.

If it takes too long to boot, to switch appications, to accept input, has too short a battery life, or cannot keep with simple video applications due to hardware limitations, the architectural fanboys are not going to be enough of a market to keep it in business. Small sales won't bring down the cost of manufacturing to compete.

I'm afraid that you're going on to expose part of the underlying problems. 100,000 individually built, individual managed servers are likely to suffer 50,000 catastrophic failures for dozens of different reasons, ranging from lost passwords, accidental deletion with no snapshots, hardware failures, breakins due to incompetence such as using FTP, breakins because they choose terrible passwords, and others. These are _precisely_ why so many people are going to cloud services

Frankly, many of the "just ask around" answers you'll find even from technical friends, are horrible and have profound consequences to the safety or reliability of your data. I make quite a bit of my own salary helping companies clean up the results of technologically skilled admins. Many of them didn't bother, or didn't know how, to run real backup services and the results are devastating.

> personal FTP server

I'm afraid that, in this day and age, with the monitoring of FTP logins in man-in-the-middle attacks worldwide, no public facing FTP server should be considered "private". FTPS or FTPS or any of several other good protocols all can help with this. But I've encountered far too many environments where people use the same password for their FTP, and their email access, and insist on making it publicly available. Then they wonder why their systems get broken into.

> Of course, the railgun has a much longer range, a much higher speed,

The railgun range today is effectively _zero_. High velocity rounds have been launched from test guns, but none have actually successfully hit a moving target without a pre-plotted course for the target, nor have any significantly sized railguns been successfully tested from a portable platform. They also wear out so fast that the mass and resources saved on ammunition are effectively taken up by the necessary spare parts for the railgun itself. I'm afraid they're much like dotcom business plans. The drawing on the back of the napkin looks fabulous, but the actual engineering has turned out to have real limits.

> get in a job with a clearance.

Then you often cannot publish, nor can you discuss details of your work with the best non-military people in the field. You can also wind up ordered to commit illegal or unconstitutional acts with no safe legal or political recourse. Do remember that Edward Snowden was a contractor and reported illegal activity to his superiors, and was told to "shut up" before he want to the press with very solid proof of illegal and abusive and unconstitutional activity by parts of the federal government.

> the risk of somebody doing something nefarious with the information they got it pretty low.

On a case by case baseis, yes. On a wholesale basis, the risk gets quite large, and they _script_ their attacks.

There's still Snap-On, but oh my, are they expensive. And it's very, very hard to find a Snap-On truck to try out the tools at: I've made friends with a car mechanic who lets me know when they're visiting. Screw drivers that _fit a human hand_, and whose grips do not wear out in a year, and pliers that do not have their teeth fray are well worth the money I can now afford for a few better tools.

> you likely won't find anything you want there

30 minute cell phone screen repair was a real winner. All the cell phone vendors wanted me to leave my phone overnight. I couldn't easily give up my mostly intact Iphone to repair the screen until I spent the time for a latte waiting for my local Radio Shack repair center to do a very good job. But when I coundn't find wire cutters in the largest local Radio Shack, I was pretty shocked.

It's an ice cream shop. If it's like my favorite ice cream shop, that menu can change 3 times in one hour as the ice cream as ice cream is used up and new ice cream taken out for use, or as some of their dozens of flavors run out near the end of the business day.

This takes time and is prone to forgetting. It also requires keyboard space somewhere unlikely to wind up covered with product. That counter space is _expensive_, every foot not in use for real service is lost to profit.

> ou are forgetting that the default for SSH is to abort during a MITM

With stolen hostkeys on the same IP address? Or by presenting a new host IP in DNS with their own MITM keys, connecting to an unencrypted login transaction logger, and recording the user login attempt and passwords, then using them next time to connect to forward the connection to the relevant upstream host? Or any of a dozen other MITM approaches?

I've been through just such an attack. Fortunately, the person doing the attack gave themselves away by failing to deal with 'ssh-agent' based connections, which is when I got called: key based access to the attacked server stopped working.

>> Catastrophe is a critical factor in most evolutionary history.

> Citation, please.

Wikipedia has a fairly good entry on "Catastrophism", and another on "Punctuated equilibrium". But even without large scale events such as dinosaur killer asteroids or the evolution of photosynthesis poisoning most species with much higher concentrations of volatile oxygen, the are much smaller and more frequent effects. Forest fires are a crtical factor in breeding jack pine trees, floods are vital to the fertility of the ecosystem near river banks, and hurricanes spread species throughout their trail and profoundly affect the ecology and evolution of areas that are likely to endure hurricanes. And catastrophes can and do create a "founder effect", where a small number of introduced species members become a new species quite quickly in their new environment.

Do I need to find individual links links for each of those?

Catastrophe is a critical factor in most evolutionary history. Practices and traits that were successful, successful enough to become part of the biology or lifesstyle of an organism, often fail as circumstances change. I'm afraid that abrupt changes in environment are a common, through often unpredicatable, factor in many species.