They also said "like you'd take to the gym" as a way of explaining pints, and used cubic feet.

In other words drinking water was the most "understandable" part of it for the audience it was written for, and oxygen and fuel would have just drawn blank stares.

I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

What does any of this have to do with servers though? These concerns should be the last thing on your list of factors to consider, when talking about servers.

So why haven't they erected a barricade and a "road closed" sign? Hell a "your map is 100 years out of date" sign under that would be hilarious.

I've tried to find some auto parts places before, and Google Maps didn't differentiate the local warehouses from actual places of business.

Fortunately I was intelligent enough to realize that what looks like a warehouse and doesn't have much parking (and tons of truck docks) was in fact a warehouse, and not your local NAPA parts store...

Lets ignore "The Terrorists" for a moment - this should be secured even just to prevent FOD!

I'd prefer it if RANDOM_ASSHAT's antenna decoration doesn't fall off and get sucked into the engine of the plane I'm going to be in later that day.

I thought one of the primary draws of puppy is it was a "live" system - no need to install.

I haven't used it in at least that long, myself - so I couldn't tell you if that was changed. To be honest I couldn't tell you what it looked like! I used puppy for a very short while. For me, DSL replaced it (and even then I didn't use that long, preferring instead to just install a "normal" distro). I've used what feels like dozens of distros and I keep landing back at either Debian or CentOS even for my desktop. They don't have that big a footprint unless you install everything :)

You can rebuild packages with patches you want to include, and that knowledge transfers to Ubuntu as well. I'd look into it if only to understand how it might be done - you never know when you need to tweak/patch something and don't want to "break" dependencies or the like.

Oh I definitely see the draw when you're talking about someone's desktop, laptop, workstation etc - I'm speaking strictly of servers.

They do make some boneheaded decisions though.

It was a few years ago, but I remember one particularly fun instance: to shave a few seconds off of boot time, they made a change that caused PS/2 and AT keyboards to not function.

Read that again. Think about it.

I'd use Gentoo if the USE flags were better documented (eg "why you would use this" is missing. It tells you what they do, but not why that might matter)

What window manager were you using? There's usually a way to change this key assignment in a "control center" item somewhere - or at least under .config or the like in your home directory. Depends on the window manager of course.

I usually use Super (windows key) as I've yet to ever see a program use Super+mousebutton for anything. In my case, Blender likes alt+clickdrag. I never end up using it though, clicking and dragging on the titlebar is so strongly ingrained into my habits that I just... never think to do it differently.

What kthreadd says. Also, remember that it's based off of Debian. Debian stable (and testing) does not use bleeding-edge items. Go read.

It would have been stupid easy: aptitude install xubuntu-desktop

That's it. Bam. Next login, chose XFCE for your session. You'd still have all the extra software, but you could remove the 'ubuntu-desktop' metapackage and lots of that would likely go away. Or you could leave it and just not run it - up to you, disk space is cheap.

Hell, apt-changelog (or is it apt-listchanges? or apt-bugs? hmm) makes it difficult to break yourself during an upgrade. The updater shows you the changelog and any outstanding bugs before proceeding!