I'm not sure who "we" is anymore. Smart people like yourself would not do many of the things we're seeing done. I think it's within your power to control the slippage at least starting with you. Again, the word is "tolerance". When will you say "Enough. No mas."?

If you need one, I'm happy to send you a UNIX (or simple instructions on how to build one) that does not have the complexity of Ubuntu but runs just as fast and does all the same stuff, sans the gratuitous GUI's. You can always add GUI layers later if you want them. My guess is you won't once you see how much faster things are, and how few processes you need to be running at any given time.