What happens prior to step #1 from a candidate's perspective? How do candidates express interest and do 100% of the folks who express interest get a call?
I was having trouble with that yesterday, as well. On the settings page for my repository, I switched from www.example.com to example.com and then back again to www.example.com. I noticed it is now working for my site, though I don't know for sure that my changes fixed it.
It sounds like you're asking some of the same questions that David Nolen is asking (and answering) with Om Next. If you haven't been following that process, you might find it informative. You can find some details about Om Next on the wiki https://github.com/omcljs/om/wiki and several talks by David are available YouTube.
I use Ubuntu on my laptop. I've found that I typically don't need the latest and greatest versions of various software, and have been happy with 12.04 LTS. I suspect that my next version will be 16.04 LTS. I value the Long Term Support releases because I can stick with the same system for several years and still get security updates. At this point in my life / career, I'm not nearly as interested in with tinkering and tweaking things and would rather have something that generally works and is stable.
I've toyed with the idea of going with CentOS on a desktop, but I think that release cycle may be a little too slow. Ubuntu's LTS every two years gives me the opportunity to upgrade sooner if there's a compelling reason (e.g., Docker support).
I do web development at a consultancy (lots of different projects in a variety of languages / environments) and have in the past been able to do a pretty decent job isolating different client applications while running them locally. However, these days I'm moving more to Vagrant for some of the heavier applications and likely to Docker for some of the lighter ones.