Update: Thank you all for your kind and quick responses! I installed Void and antiX and cruised around in them a little. I ended up defaulting back to Artix in the end. The hardware issues with the NIC seem to have gotten resolved. Whatever toxicity and bigotry is present among their larger demographic, I'm going to spread as much light and love as possible. That is, until I switch OS again. 🤣

I have literally never whined about distros before. I went through some Debian based ones, some Arch based one and also installed a base version of Gentoo.

I am most fond of Arch, but after trying Artix, I found that I'm more comfortable with OpenRC as init and process management.

In addition to the latest Artix making my NIC unrecognized by the OS, the Artix forums also seem to house at least some transphobia. This is as good as any opportunity for me to finally ask the question to the world wide web:

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T480 on which I want to use mpv to play video. What Linux flavor do you recommend for a non desktop setup? I looked briefly at Slackware, but it seemed somewhat prepackaged, as opposed to configured by me.