You forgot the step where you write three paragraphs explaining why you want a server account and get denied because you didn't supply sufficient detail for them to approve your application.
I didn't expect to find a Stone Soup entry so early in the list. It's perfect for me because I can just spawn a new window inside my tmux session, type soup, hit enter, and etch-a-sketch my brain for a few minutes.
I distro hopped a lot in the 2006-2011 era, and eventually settled on Arch. I like the initial simplicity, the wiki was and still is the best resource to this day, and anything I needed from the kitchen sink was accessible via the AUR. I've ended up using it on my workstations, work laptops, and personal machines ever since.
This. Esc, then b. Or if you're a stickler for keeping you hands on home row, Ctrl [ does the trick as well. Bonus points for making that more comfortable via a remapping of Caps Lock to control (or swapping the two).
I find it ironic to this day that, after having spent so much time identifying the most fitting tiling window manager for my needs (i3), my journey through GNU Screen to tmux resulted in an almost complete absence of necessity for tiling at all. Heck, if it weren't for my gaming and streaming needs, I actually could skip X entirely.
You forgot the step where you write three paragraphs explaining why you want a server account and get denied because you didn't supply sufficient detail for them to approve your application.