For me it’s PeppermintOS.

I started my Linux adventure a few years ago, and haven’t owned a Windows PC since.

I currently use Arch on my main rig, and I wanted to install Linux on two old laptops that I found laying around in my house

I then remembered the first distro I ever used, which is PeppermintOS, and I was amazed at the latest updates they released.

They even have a mini ISO now to do a net-install with no bloat, with a Debian or Devuan base.

Sadly, I believe the founder passed away a few years ago, which is why I was really happy to see the continuation of this amazing project.

    • @[email protected]
      18•11 months ago

      I generally don’t understand why people go for the smaller ones at all. I guess it’s good that someone does to prevent the whole scene being dominated by a single distro, but with some exceptions (e.g. you hate systemd for some reason and really want systemd-less arch, or you have a super niche preferences). For 99% of distros it makes very little difference which one you use, except that you’ll have fewer resources at your disposal (fewer packages, fewer stack overflow threads, fewer everything).

      • ares35
        3•11 months ago

        ubuntu pushing snap is what pushed me away. i had used it since warty and was a regular contributor in the official forums. i went back to pure debian, and have since added mint and manjaro (yes i know about its history) desktops, and a few dietpi on x64 (no sbc here), two of which run my piholes.

      • @[email protected]
        1•11 months ago

        Doing changes right is a bit hard. With immutable Distros, some changes are easier like adding or removing packages, bur core OS adaptions are harder.

        But for example how would you convert regular Ubuntu to

        • unsnap
        • KDE Desktop, no GNOME at all
        • rolling mesa and more
        • …

        This all gets messy, so people choose small distros

    • circuitfarmer
      1•11 months ago

      The nature of FOSS suggests (make that extra italic) that the most popular distros should be those that actually work the best. Totally agree that Ubuntu is an outlier, and even that is because of choices Canonical made – and corporate decisions really aren’t typically a part of FOSS.

      That said, I truly enjoy smaller distros for hobbyism. I don’t necessarily see a use case where they should be chosen over a larger one, except for the really annoying fact that distros with corporate backing will always also tend to get quicker adoption.