The 2025 Refresh
Why These Choices

Assessing a system for a living means being able to say exactly what's running and why. A full desktop environment is a lot of moving parts to account for; a WM you chose component-by-component is a system you can actually reason about — the same instinct behind reviewing a security boundary rather than trusting a bundled default. Wayland has closed most of its gaps in the last few years, but "closed most of" isn't "closed," and swapping a display server is cheap enough to do later. Changing distros is the expensive move — this isn't.

/etc/apt/preferences.d/no-cinnamon.pref and Install-Recommends false aren't about disk space. They're configuration-drift control — the same reason a monitored system gets checked against its authorized baseline instead of trusted to stay put on its own. An upgrade silently pulling in a full desktop you didn't ask for is exactly the kind of unauthorized state change that should never pass quietly, on a laptop or an aircraft system.

workstation, full, minimal, guardrails are named, documented configurations — not a memory of which flags I ran last time. That's the same reason an authorization boundary gets written down instead of inferred from whatever's currently deployed: if you can't reproduce it from a document, you don't actually know what it is. A flight checklist works the same way — the list is the authority, not the pilot's memory of what usually gets done.

Move to the current stack, but never remove the way back until the new one's proven itself. It's the identical shape as keeping a password-only breakglass account around while rolling out FIDO2 login: adopt the improvement, keep a tested rollback path, don't burn the bridge on day one.

Backlight and volume move in explicit, named steps (±5%) instead of whatever a slider happens to land on. That's a small thing, but it's the same preference that shows up in ham radio gear — a knob with detents you can count, not a touchscreen you have to eyeball. Precise, repeatable control beats a prettier default.

Current and maintained, not experimental. It's the same standard I'd apply to an aircraft: fly something with up-to-date avionics and active maintenance, not a museum piece and not somebody's homebuilt project. Testing gets fixes faster than Stable and has already been shaken out more than Sid — that middle ground is the point, not a compromise.

DOSBox Staging, ScummVM, xgalaga, xmahjongg — genuinely lightweight, and genuinely there on purpose. The same deliberate throwback flavor shows up in the training tool's own 1990s-cyber styling: it's not nostalgia for its own sake, it's a reminder that a system can be current under the hood and still have some personality on top.