Don’t mean to be overly combative here, but how does Debian preclude you from having to fiddle with things? Do you just like all the defaults then?

I love Debian myself, and I use it for all my personal projects where something needs to run unattended because it’s rock solid, but there are still a lot of defaults that I want to change every time to make it suitable for me. Now admittedly I’m fairly opinionated about these things, but I mean, out of the box the default editor is nano (!). So as a result I created a “fiddlescript” that’s a mile long and that I run on every new installation.