The other thing I liked was how the author took ownership of the situation while expecting less at the same time. I had this experience using little-known and semi-custom OS's for high security setups. The secure system lacked access to so much stuff. Yet, it had enough stuff on it to be useful and content-proxies were easy enough to build. I occasionally wanted a certain program, Youtube video, or whatever. Yet, my system did exactly what I designed it to do, nothing more and nothing less. And, like the author, I was happy with it rather than disappointed. It's a strange, good feeling which I'm not sure most people experience while using their computers.
Of course, with KVM switch, I could always go right back to a full Windows/Linux system if I couldn't resist the urge or needed to do something modern. We can have the best of both worlds.