.
Things I liked:
Reasonably fast server brings in 937 Mb iso in 10-15 min.
Universal LiveUSB installer easily makes LiveUSB.
ALL my laptop hardware recognized and drivers provided
....except for internal closed-source wifi.
Easily sets up open-source external wifi.
Xfce desktop neat, intuitive & responsive.
Uses Ubuntu whisker menu and includes a LibreMenu menu editor.
Network mgr working well, given wifi drivers.
FF is 25; LO is 4.2; amd64 kernel is 3.13.
Boots to browser on-line in ~60 sec; shut-down < 5 sec.
GUI makes it easy to disable my touchpad which disrupts typing.
Things I didn't like:
Inefficient choices in initial 937 Mb base configuration.
937 Mb iso doesn't include closed-source ttf-mscorefonts, Broadcom drivers & flash;
....also doesn't include open-source LibreOffice, Geany & tzdata.
Configuring 2 Gb of persistence took a really long time.
LibreOffice took a long time to bring in as well.
*Apt-get needed to install tzdata; ntp updates desktop to local time on reboot.
Mousepad editor poorer than leafpad, much poorer than gedit IMO.
Bug 1: whisker menu editor doesn't save (or properly display) liveUSB favorites;
....Mint 16 doesn't have this problem with favorites panel display
Bug 2: does not recognize closed-source drivers brought in
....nor indicate correct status of devices using closed-source drivers.
LibreMenu requires a wholesale upgrade of gtk+ and python3 infrastructure.
Things I don't understand:
Why screensaver set only to blank screen.
Why Ubuntu Software Center rather than Synaptic.
*Maybe because I didn't understand Ubuntu Software Center usage as root.
HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Blade 2x E5-2690v4 2.6GHz =28 Cores 32GB P246 650FLB
$223.00
DELL PEM640 POWEREDGE M640 BLADE SERVER
$539.95
Dell PowerEdge FX2s CTO Blade 4 Slot 2U Chassis 2x 2000W
$399.00
Sun Microsystems Blade 100 Workstation UltraSPARC-IIe 500MHz 256MB Server No HDD
$95.00
HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 Blade Server Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 - 512GB RAM
$255.61
Dell PowerEdge M620 Blade Server 2x 10C E5-2690v2 64GB Ram 2x 600GB 10k HDD
$125.00
Google Search Appliance - Dell PowerEdge R710 x2 Xeon X5690 192GB Memory 6TB HDD
$529.99
Dell PowerEdge M520 Blade Server Xeon E5-2403 NO HDD NO RAM
$40.00
DELL PowerEdge M630 Blade 2x E5-2680v4 2.4GHz =28 Cores 128GB H330 2x10Gb X520
$275.00
DELL POWEREDGE M630 BLADE 2x 12 CORE E5-2690 v3 2.6GHz 24X16GB 384GB RAM NO HDD
$399.00