> why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS..., and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years.

I strongly agree! It saves me time and decreases the number of incompatibilities I have to deal with. Not every program gets this treatment, but as much as possible i try not to change the defaults, especially with the OS.

A colleague also persuaded me that statically linking my binaries was the best long term approach. I started out thinking he was crazy but no, he was right.