It is just a very simple clean stable unopinionated rolling release distro. It doesn’t try to be bleeding edge, or force you down any particular path. Its not a derivative of another distro. It uses runit for its init process, no systemd and is just really nice and clean to use. I’ve been on it about 12 months after swapping from arch which I had used for about 15 years. No plans to move any time soon.

Can’t help you with river specifically, but I went from running x11 with openbox, to Wayland with sway. Sway has a really good ecosystem of tools like swaybg for wallpaper. I use waybar, pcmanfm, and rofi.

After 15 years on arch, last year I looked at Gentoo, artix and void. I chose void and have no complaints. It’s a very unopinionated distro, uses runit, rolling release, nice package manager, and works well with just compiling packages you want from source. My arch was heavily optimised and clean, but runit is so simple to use and boot times are insane. After post, my boot is around 3 seconds. Shutdown is about 1-2 seconds.

I don’t touch or maintain anything, my setup is completely automated.

I run navidrome as my music server. I use transmission, through a namespace with a VPN attached and port forwarded, all managed through systemd and I just turn it on and off as needed. I dump all music in any condition in my music folder and torrent dump music there once completed. Beets manages and fixes my music folder meta tags automatically.

I have 2x it hdd’s in software raid with mdadm which I use as my backup storage. My server mounts the array, writes the backup, unmounts the array, spins down the disks and puts them to sleep completely automatically every night at 1am. They never wake or spin up at all during the day.

I don’t want this feature! I use immich to get away from Google. I don’t want any interaction or overlap with Google photos at all. Immich allows you to share albums perfectly fine. The person you share with needs to be able to access your immich. This is the same as Google, people need to be able to access Google photos to see your Google albums too.

I looked at all the old thin clients and didn’t like their power consumption to performance ratio. Ended up buying a cheap mini pc with an n100 and it’s been amazing. CPU is max 15w, but mostly only 1 or 2w. Whole mini pc with an nvme draws only a few w most of the time. I bought it before all the craziness for £80, had it maybe 18 months now and no complaints. It’s been rock solid.

No, the opposite. The only thing that matters is your personal taste and preferences. It’s purely and entirely about your perception. They include if you trust the maintainers, the logo, the package manager, the website, the distro name and everything else. You just choose what is important to you based on your taste and preference and choose the distro that aligns with that taste. Which distro you choose doesn’t matter at all, just pick the one you want to. If the most important thing to you is the colour pink, pick one that uses pink.

No, I think you’re missing the point. Distro really and truly doesn’t matter at all. They all can do the same stuff as each other. It’s entirely all about taste and personal preference, and nothing else. Each flavour has a different starting point, and those staying points make it quicker and easier to achieve different end goals, but they can all achieve the same end goals but with varying amounts of effort. But to stay with, just pick one and give it a try, learn how it works and what it does, then either stick or twist, but have fun learning and exploring.