Have you tried Arch? It has binary packages; GNOME, Avahi, Samba and similar basic but non-essential packages must be explicitly installed; the package manager is ridiculously fast; and it’s usually easy to install proprietary blobs and other unsupported stuff using the huge user package repository, if you’re comfortable with the associated risks.
I used Arch during the days before it switched to systemd (and before Ubuntu introduced Unity) and enjoyed it until I have accidentally found out Ubuntu feels faster on my PC so I switched to Ubuntu.
Once Ubuntu switched to GNOME3 I have switched to Manjaro (with KDE5) and I really love it (it feels like the perfect spot between Arch freshness and reasonable stability - you still get the fresh stuff reasonably fast but they test it before that so it's much less likely for an update to ruin your system) but I don't know how to get rid of Avahi:
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by geoclue
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by gvfs
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by kdnssd
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by libcups
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by mpd
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by nss-mdns
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by ostree
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by pulseaudio-zeroconf
:: removing avahi breaks dependency 'avahi' required by sane
i.e. I certainly need CUPS (to have a virtual PDF printer) and it depends on it (and I don't even know what 2/3 of the rest of the packages listed do). It is also very much possible the situation is the same on Arch.
Also, I don't really mind systemd from the practical point of view but the actual idea we were speaking about is having a simple, intuitive init system, which systemd is not.
> A fully free, stable, secure, simple, lightweight and long-term support distribution
The first, second and the last attributes make a kind of distributions I am really (really!) glad they exist but, unfortunately, am hardly going to use because from the real life perspective this means your hardware is not going to work, you won't be able to read common file formats and you will be limited to ancient version of software.
