For me it’s PeppermintOS.
I started my Linux adventure a few years ago, and haven’t owned a Windows PC since.
I currently use Arch on my main rig, and I wanted to install Linux on two old laptops that I found laying around in my house
I then remembered the first distro I ever used, which is PeppermintOS, and I was amazed at the latest updates they released.
They even have a mini ISO now to do a net-install with no bloat, with a Debian or Devuan base.
Sadly, I believe the founder passed away a few years ago, which is why I was really happy to see the continuation of this amazing project.
In fairness, when you install the nix package manager you’re going to get a full toolchain with all necessary dependencies in addition to your system ones. On NixOS these are your system ones as well so you don’t necessarily have duplicates. The same will be true of Guix afaik.
I dunno; that’s still a pretty hefty base install. Alpine is an extreme on the tiny side, but Void is pretty small, and even a headless Arch install can be smaller than just the Nix toolchain alone.
The entire Nix design is prohibitive. Say a casual software developer wants to contribute a package definition for Nix. They have to now install multiple GB of software + repo (you have to clone the Nix github repo to contribute), learn a new, bespoke programming language that is useful only for contributing packages top Nix, and deal with a very proscriptive toolchain.
I’ve fought with Nix before. I’ll provide Deb, RPM, Arch, Alpine, and Void packages; their package definitions are just metadata, are easy to understand, and easy to tool (in fact, nfpm will create the first 4 for you). But I won’t do Nix. It takes too much time and effort. Thankfully, the Nix community is pretty chill, and fairly responsive to tickets and changing and adding packages. I’d rather not have to push this work out, but I won’t take that extra load.