I prefer mplayer—novel-length man page and all—for video, but there's nothing innately wrong with VLC. I did try it, a very long time ago, but it felt too GUI-oriented for my taste back then.

(I can think of exactly two times mplayer has failled to play a file I presented it with, and in both cases it was my own fault for not compiling in support for that codec. However, the man page is justifiably frightening.)

I have a laptop of that era (2008 HP Pavilion, Athlon64x2, 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD). It runs the Trinity Desktop Environment, which works just as well now as it did when that laptop was a flagship machine. (Updating a Gentoo system running on a machine that old is a bit time-consuming, mind you, but that isn't the DE's fault.)

I've tried several of the other lighter-weight DEs—XFCE, LXDE, Lumina, Gnome2 before it became MATE—but TDE does what I need it to do, and (just as importantly) the development team prefers to work on features and compatibility rather than tearing out things that still work or forcing new paradigms that don't really make sense for my use case onto me. It's there, it's solid, and I've already learned its quirks, so I can save my brain cells for learning useful features in other programs rather than having to figure out where the control for some bit of the GUI ran off to this time. Why would I use anything else? The thing I want most from my DE is for it to stay out of the way and not keep me from using other software.

(Plus, Konqueror may no longer be useful as a web browser, but it's still a better file manager than, say, Thunar, which I found to be a pain in the arse when I tried XFCE.)

Delete all the code. Then you'll have no bugs.

should still already choose their sexuality

Sexuality is not a choice, any more than your skin colour is a choice.

To echo others here, you really need to kill the driver. There are a couple of different kernel modules that might be involved, depending on exactly how your touch panel is connected to the rest of the system. Software that has no specific touch support will likely treat your renegade hardware as a mouse, rather than ignoring it.

You may be able to unbind the driver from the device, see this discussion on stackexchange.

Dude. I actually have sources for most of my installed packages lying around, because Gentoo. Do you know how much space that source code takes up?

Just under 70GB. And pretty much everything but maybe the 10GB of direct git pulls is compressed, one way or another.

That means that even if your distro is big and has 100 people on development, they would each have to read 1GB or more of decompressed source just to cover the subset of packages installed on my system.

How fast do you read?

You don't have a cat, do you?

sudo is already an optional component (yes, really—I don't have it installed). Don't want its attack surface? You can stick with su and its attack surface instead. Either is going to be smaller than systemd's.

systemd's feature creep is only surpassed by that of emacs.

It stopped being secret a couple of years ago.

If I recall correctly, ext3 is ext2 with journalling on top, so they can't really get rid of ext2 without also ditching ext3.

Which is why Electron reminds me of a little kid who's just done some extremely difficult but utterlly pointless thing.

Websites belong in a browser. If it doesn't work in any random standards-compliant browser, then you should be delivering it as a true native application, not some horrific fiji-mermaid-esque hybrid.

Well, I can still boot my system without an initram (although that isn't just due to the kernel config)—does that count?

Other than that, custom kernels free up a small amount of disk space that would otherwise be taken up by modules for driving things like CANbus, and taught me a whole lot about the existence of hardware and protocols that I will never use.