Archlinux. It tries to track mainline as close as possible, as a result it has minimal patches to software. Very vanilla. It can be as light weight or as heav

Archlinux. It tries to track mainline as close as possible, as a result it has minimal patches to software. Very vanilla. It can be as light weight or as heavy as you want. Most important to me is that it's rolling release so you never have to do a major upgrade. I prefer to handle software changes one at a time instead of in big batches. My laptop installation is from 2015, I've used brtfs send to migrate it to new hardware three times now. I have servers that have been installed for longer. Yeah it's a slightly more involved installation process, but you really only have to do it once.