I was using Ubuntu - but the Snaps drove me away. Due to the substandard performance, horrible load times, and UI/System integration issues reached a tipping point. So back to Debian - and I've found it's improved MUCH over the past 10 years. Very happy again.
One of the reasons why I am afraid of less common distros such as Gentoo or Alpine is that I think I may not find enough information needed to install all the dependencies required to compile Bitcoin Core and Core Lightning nodes from source. That is why I tend to use Debian or its derivatives like Ubuntu or Antix-base. How has you experience with installing software needed to run Bitcoin been?
I'll be honest, I don't use Gentoo as the base OS for a server mostly for this reason. I do use it as my daily driver desktop/laptop OS, and for things that aren't in the package manager I'll throw together a quick Docker wrapper using the newest Ubuntu Server LTS or whatever the install instructions suggest.
I use Antix-base. It is very lightweight, especially the icewm window manager and also easy to use on a laptop as it is floating. Also Antix is easier to customize for me than Debian.
I’m using Manjaro with Gnome currently and find it a really stable and easy to use distro. Been a die hard Ubuntu fan, but imho it kind of moved away from its roots.
Thanks for creating this territory!