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.

    • aleq@lemmy.world
      17·
      10 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@kbin.social
        2·
        10 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.

      • molochthagod@lemmy.world
        1·
        10 months ago

        There are still subtle changes that non-techy users wouldn’t know how to deal with. For example, can you explain why the same exact games (either native or Wine) would work on one Ubuntu-based distro, but not on another? And it’s not like the lesser-known ones are always the worst. Currently my two favorite distros are HamoniKR and Pardus, which are very obscure, but I find them the most user-friendly, OOTB experiences I’ve had. And I have distro-hopped a lot.

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        1·
        10 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