.
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.
IBM CS821 20-Core 2.827GHz 128Gb 1.92Tb SSD 1U Linux Server - 8005-12N Power 8
$479.96
IBM 8247-22L S822L 2 CPUs 256GB 12x Drives SFF Power8 Linux Server
$749.00
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server - New and Sealed
$19.99
Asus ESC4000 G3 Barebones 0GB HDD Linux
$200.00
IBM E850 Power8 2x 12C 3.02GHz 512Gb 1.8Tb SAS 10GbE 16Gb Linux Server 8408-E8E
$799.96
1U BareMetal pfsense opnsense Router Firewall DNS Server 6x 10GB Ethernet Ports
$149.00
Dell PowerEdge R730xd Server 2.60Ghz 32-Core 64GB 800GB SSD Debian Linux
$880.25
1U SFF Supermicro Server X10DRW-iT 2x (Xeon 36 Cores) 128GB 2x PCI-E X16 Slots
$428.00
IBM System X 3250 M5 Single Xeon Quad Core E3-1220 v3 @3.1GHz,8GB RAM,Linux SUSE
$199.87
POGO Linux WEBWARE 1150 Rack-Mount Server Pentium 4 2.8GHz 512MB - No Drives
$179.99