Yuor cunt

I find Debian to be a good middle ground between minimalism and stability/simplicity.
UI doesn't really depend on the distro, you can install whatever you want. Usually I go for good old Fluxbox.

Ubuntu is also not bad for people who actually have a job and not the time to fix their meme distro every day

let's share our portage nightmare stories

I got fed up of having $huge_complex_package taking 45 minutes to compile just to fail because...¯\_(少)_/¯

it got so bad that there was like 4 huge packages that wouldn't compile because of dependency hell and eventually some critical package refused to upgrade and essentially blocked my entire system from upgrading

that's when I switched back to debian

I haven't heard of it but it looks neat though. Might toss it on a vm desu

keep in mind when it comes to linux distros you can install any DE/WM you want, and use it over the distro's pre-installed DE/WM (if it came with one)

cinnamon, I love cinnamon
lxde is also really easy to use, looks like fucking garbage though

then there's openbox. It's got a bit of a learning curve but it shouldn't be impossible for a beginner. You can also make it look really, really nice looking.
If you DO go the openbox route, make sure you install obconf and obmenu, they make configuring and themeing it a million times easier

or you could do this but it's harder

>best UI
you can install other desktop environments that the default one, so it's not really a question
>Ubuntu was garbage
what did you not like about it?
and mint is the other beginner distro
or some other flavor of ubuntu with a different DE preinstalled, if you want to give it another try.

>I got fed up of having $huge_complex_package taking 45 minutes to compile
our senior sysadmin told my stories about using gentoo on weak as fug pentiums like 15 years ago. they waited literally days for shit to compile

linux holocaust

if you're unable to maintain a distro then the problem might not always be the distro and your lack of time, but you yourself and your lack of skill

Haha holy fuck, about two years ago when I was in highschool, my computer teacher let me fuck around with the old donated Dell Optiplexes

they had 512MB-2GB of ram and either ancient celerons or pentiums

I wanted to see how well I could get them to run on a bare-bones linux install. I chose debian for one and gentoo for another.

It took me 4 days to get the most minimal gentoo install + the X server and dwm running on it.

debian one was up in 30 minutes.

hahahahahahohohohohohohohoh

Or because you're maintaining gentoo
Multilib in general was always a nightmare with portage. Sometimes there would be a million dependencies, some depending on one another and if one fails that's it.