As to the stone thing: most of the houses and apartments in Germany are mainly stone walls. Somehow we manage it here.
Benefits include: massive soundproofing. Heat and cold envelope. Stability of buildings in tighter blocks. Build once, use forever.
Store is just fine, and yes we have an impact drill. It cost 30 Euro and does all of the light duty stuff we need.
Renovations are tougher, but also rarer.
Shit. I’ve been on Debian for decades now. Maybe I’m just an old soul… Or I’m just lazy. I don’t even configure my DE anymore. The OS install of today will be wiped in no time, so it’s not worth being too attached.
I did a tour with OpenBSD about 2000-2004. It works just fine, with a much reduced ecosystem of pre built packages, just because of the quantity of devs around.
I saw Dragonfly when it started and I’m glad to hear it’s still going. The idea held a lot of promise.
I have a small home server that I occasionally push through huge batch processing jobs. During the pushes, I might collide with other projects that use a pretty big chunk of the RAM. So, to make sure it’s never a killer (just a major slow down), I made a 32GB swap file. If I need it, it’s there and disk is hella cheap.
This machine has never had a GUI installed. No browsers to complain about, just plain old data processing, stats models, and old skool computing.
Now, my worst case scenario was building a C++ program on a raspberry pi gen 1. That has 256MB of RAM. g++ ran out building, so I NFS mounted a huge disk from my desktop machine and made the swap file there. The build took a while… but the program ran fine after the week long build, no swap needed.