As a general best practice, you should never directly login as root on any server, and those servers should be configured to not allow remote connections as the root user. You should always log in as a non-root user and only run commands as root using sudo or similar features offered by your desktop environment. You should be wary of even having an interactive root shell open; usually I would only do so on a VM console, when first setting up a system or debugging it.

By doing this, you not only guard against other people compromising your system, but also against accidentally running commands as root that could damage your system. It’s always best to only run things with the minimum permissions they need, and then only grant them additional permissions on an as-needed basis.

NixOS. If I’m going to invest that much effort to configure a system I don’t want to have to put up with systemd.

FediDB: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

It still has the limitations of JSON churn, but I find jsonnet to be a nice functional-style DSL in which to write grafana dashboards.