ALiteralCabbage

As originally conceived, the engineer's iron ring rubs against the drawings and paper upon which the Engineer writes and even in modern times, serves as a reminder when working on a computer.

Think it's intended more for the design engineer than the construction engineer.

But that said you can get some decent silicone rings that won't de-glove you if they get caught these days.

North American engineers sometimes wear an Iron Ring, apparently.

They might not be American - I don't think anywhere else does the iron ring thing....

It smacks of elitism, that's all.

The OS is simply a means to an end. If Linux offers a way to do what they want in a way that is less hassle, and it meets their needs, then that's a good thing.

customizable and configurable

Whatever you think of OPs proposed use case is definitely falls under the above.

It's this kind of 1337 h@xor approach to the OS that makes people feel like it's unapproachable when that's so far from the reality these days.

Not really - there's plenty of use cases where running memory intensive stuff like that isn't an issue and running a small footprint distro makes more sense than, say, a maximalist, fully featured desktop distro.

I'm not trying to run a media centre or play games on my 11 year old MacBook!

Point taken!

I don't think the lite distros are to blame for performance drops in that case, are they? Unless it's down to a lack of system optimisation.

Fair enough!

I've done some blindingly stupid things with my installs in the past, and I'm not angling to try any in the near future - I guess I'll just embrace the reinstallation game!

That's a blast from the past! I used to run #! On my 701...

So if there's additional repositories does that mean that there is likely to be core functionality which would be broken if it stops being maintained?