For medium to advanced users, I believe the best experience is derived from installing a distro that gives you just a tty and building up from there. Debian’s packages are too old. Arch’s too new lol, I don’t wanna have to think about my updates at all. Void is the perfect middle ground between those, installs similar to Debian, and even boots faster than both :)
(Gentoo is a no no)
Slow af but comfy