> everything else is mostly UI bling and attempted vendor lock.
Well that's a ridiculous generalization to make. There are many solid distros that are none of that (e.g. Gentoo, Arch/Parabola, Debian, LFS, just to name a handful)
I would like to include Void as a serious, competent and elegant distribution. I've used it for a complete year, and have really come to appreciate its focus on simplicity, reminds how Arch was before they decided to use systemd.
Likewise. My initial statement was a smidge hyperbolic, as I really do like Void and run it on a Raspberry Pi. It has many of the same traits that make Slackware and pre-systemd Arch so appealing.
Before I migrated to Void, I used slackware-current extensively, it is indeed the cleanest GNU/Linux distribution I've found. Personally, I loved manually dependency resolution, but sadly didn't had the time to do it, so I ended up with Void, and it really shines on staying out of my way.
I use Void on my media PC and Gentoo everywhere else. I've considered using Void on my NAS, either that or maybe Alpine.
I'm glad you brought up this distribution. I think when we see more and more go the Docker route, we'll see more minimalist hosted systems that are Void or Alphine for hosting containers and container schedulers.
Well that's a ridiculous generalization to make. There are many solid distros that are none of that (e.g. Gentoo, Arch/Parabola, Debian, LFS, just to name a handful)