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The local /home directory is local to each load-balanced server, and is not backed up, and is for temporary storage only. Networked filesystems such as AFS, NFS, GPFS, or Lustre should be used for data and permanent storage.
Desktop environment:
The desktop environment installed is MATE, which was chosen for the balance of user friendliness, and also being lightweight on memory and cpu requirements.
Terminal emulation:
The recommended terminal emulation program is gnome-terminal. Other choices which are installed include xterm, mate-terminal, and xfce4-terminal.