@NewtronStar - I'm so new to *nix and the Pi that I'm just trying to get a feel for what's worth doing, and haven't even picked an os yet. Raspbian has so much stuff available, in terms of pre-cooked software, documents tutorials and so forth, so that tends to make it the obvious choice. But *BSD and Windows 10 are also calling to me.
I'd live to get some top tips regarding good tools, so that I don't start off doing things in a really horrible, painful way.