Hey man, if Slack and Gentoo are too familiar, there's always Source Mage or Linux from Scratch if you wanna go even more minimal. BSD could be fun, so could GUIX, or even MINIX, though I'm certain that's as low as you can go without going the way of Terry Davis.
Jesus, way to make me feel old, dude.
For gentoo, it should default to openrc so long as you select any non-systemd profiles. openrc is pretty mature when I was using it, the only annoyance is occasional service crashes like PPP not automatically starting back, but I fault that more with my ISP being a shit than anything. You can write supervised openrc services which uses s6 in the background, you can also run s6 for your user services, it depends how autistic you want to go.
I'm running Bazzite on my main laptop, it's basically a Fedora Atomic spin with Steam and other gaming-related patches thrown in. I had to get used to not being able to easily customize it on a system level (rpm-ostree is super slow, and they're going to replace it with bootc), and it relies on Flatpaks and Distrobox for running most software. Apart from their marketing, it's nothing that Nobara or Ultramarine Linux can't handle.
Ime openrc does have a smaller memory foot print, compared to systemd. Runit is about as fast as it gets when it comes to boot times. Though it does keep extra processes along with services to monitor them. So that does have an extra 1mb or so per service, compared to openrc. Whether that matters or not is up to you.
Coming from being a normal Linux distro user. I REALLY hate the way these distros work.
because AKSHUALLY they're right. keep in mind how the average normalfag interacts with the underlying OS. all things considered fucking windows 11 looks and feels "less" windows than cinnamon or kde.
All the small little fixes and diagnostic tools that an above-average Windows user knows how to use are different, and that is the biggest frustration multiplier for people starting out with Linux.
I was that user when I came to linux. I went into linux knowing nothing. Other than I didn't like windows, google, etc. I started with mint. Knew literally nothing, but for the normie tasks I was going to use on windows. It worked, didn't need any extra messing around. And I ended up being glad I moved over.
That is a good point. It isn't that Linux is super hard to use, it's just different. It's hard to communicate that in a way that like girds potential Linux users for troubleshooting issues to be more confusing and annoying than what they're used to, but also encourages them to fire up an installer and take the plunge.
I don't like the discourse of "oh man, use Mint if you're used to Windows" because things like Debian or Ubuntu and even to an extent Arch, are not as scary as they're made out to be. You would have the impression that Mint is a graphical interface like Windows, and that the rest are complex CLI, where you have to build everything. I really don't know why people do that, it's so comforting when you take the plunge into Debian and realise it's literally just an older-looking Windows/MacOS, except you have more control over your system.
Ultimately that's going to be the biggest hurdle for Linux, that it's adoption heavily relies on the alternatives being shit. A computer is a tool first and foremost for people, not a toy. Most people want a Honda Civic or a Grand Caravan that's boring but does its job, not a Corvette or some vintage car they spend every day working on. And for most people there is just enough of a hurdle for Linux that makes it not worth the jump. Heck even me a while back I tried Linux Mint for a month and concluded it was perfectly useable, but switched back to Windows because I simply didn't see the need to make the jump - up until a couple months later when Windows royally pissed me off with its ass. Even then when I set up my ThinkPad to dive to my dad I was surprised how things like the LTE modem and fingerprint scanner just worked without having to fuss with it a lot.
Because some people do actually see all the different distros existing as confusing, and I've heard people give it as a reason to not use linux. Mint is a perfect starting point. And it's what the average person will probably need from their computer. It baby's people just enough that they can feel comfortable using their computer still, out of the box. But at the same time. If someone want's more from it, it doesn't stop you from doing whatever you want.
absolute madlad.
If I remember correctly there was some guy charging like $10 on the windows store for a 1 click installer of Fedora on WSL for the normies who couldn't figure out how to import a .tar, so fuck that guy and good for Fedora.
