I do find I like the idea of not having systemd. I don’t hate it, but it feels unnecessary. If I end up back on Arch, I’ll check that out!

Looks promising! Seems to check all the boxes. I think I’ll try it first. I’ll give it a spin in a VM, get a feel for it. Thanks!

I don’t have a specific example, just seemed like something a user friendly distro might do.

I’ll look further in to that Debian based Mint. Thanks for the the recommendation!

Your mentioning i3 got me to thinking using a light window manager would probably go a long way to keep dependencies down and simplify maintenance.

I’ve been running sway on a laptop and I’m starting to get accustomed to it. Might be worth considering.

Looks like OpenSuse is sponsored by SUSE, which has an enterprise Linux product.