I have literally never whined about distros before. I went through some Debian based ones, some Arch based one and also installed a base version of Gentoo.
I am most fond of Arch, but after trying Artix, I found that I’m more comfortable with OpenRC as init and process management.
In addition to the latest Artix making my NIC unrecognized by the OS, the Artix forums also seem to house at least some transphobia. This is as good as any opportunity for me to finally ask the question to the world wide web:
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T480 on which I want to use mpv to play video. What Linux flavor do you recommend for a non desktop setup? I looked briefly at Slackware, but it seemed somewhat prepackaged, as opposed to configured by me.
Alright, excellent. Thank you for the reply!
So, IIUC, you want a clean slate. Furthermore, you want plenty of tinkerability. And, finally, OpenRC enjoys a preference.
Still, I want to limit our search (for now) to (relatively) upstream distros on which OpenRC is known to work pretty well. We have to start our search from somewhere and this seems to be the most sensible starting point at this point.
If you’ve dismissed Artix, that basically leaves us (in alphabetical order) to:
IIRC, most (if not all) of these offer very minimal images. So, hopefully you’ll enjoy those.
Thankfully, these are meaningfully different from eachother (for the most part). So choosing between these shouldn’t be too much to ask.
FWIW, Gentoo comes undoubtedly with the least amount of defaults and thus behaves the most like a blank slate.