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.
INO, NixOS is like arch but it forces you to declare everything up front.
I’ve seen people create advanced configs with Arch then bring them over to the locked-in world of NixOS. I’d add that Home-Manager is crucial if you decide to do that (less so if you are building headless machines or VM’s). Ps. You can even build a super customized config then run it as a NixVM in your favorite container manager/k8s cluster.