Which minimalist distro and DE to choose for your home PC?

Question

linux

Hey! I want to transfer my home PC to Linux, it is used to watch movies, the Internet and several games on Steam (linux is supported).
About a year was Gentoo on the desktop. Now I'm not sure that this is the right choice, because. I think there will be no noticeable gain from self-assembly of packages on the C2D E8400 (but in general I like this distribution kit, everything is somehow logical in it).
My questions are:
1) Will installing Gentoo be justified? Or now something more minimalistic can be found?
2) What does the upgrade look like between releases in Debian? (for example, I have Debian 7, the Debian 8 stable is coming out, does this mean that "it's time to reinstall Linux" or are such updates transparent and do not have unpleasant consequences like in Gentoo?
3) xfce seems to be dead, is there a promising minimalistic DE that won't die next year, etc.?

Answer 1

1, 2 - I chose Debian testing, I directly indicated testing in sources.list, it seems that this way you can get some kind of rolling release.
I have had a bad relationship with Debian for a long time, this time it was not without adventures, mirrors are not updated (the hash sum does not match). Installed with netinst and was left without DE :) I'll wait a couple of days and still torment.
Even with accept_keywords="~x86" never had such problems in gentoo, it's very strange that with a package distribution in practice it turns out more to take. In general, everything seems to be the same, but somehow it’s not right and in the wrong places (this is my impression of Debian).
3, Concluded the death of xfce from the latest news on the official website from "28
201 2". Later I came across the news that xfce is considered as the DE by default, I hope this will only benefit the DE.

Answer 2

Choose distributions with a rolling release so that there is no "it's time to reinstall Linux". For example, Arch Linux. Plus it's pretty minimalistic and fast.
DE - openbox or xfce4.

Answer 3

Xfce is alive. Put stupidly Ubuntu. Then say sudo apt-get install xfce, exit, go under Xfce and so under it and sit. I also sit under i3. Well, or you can install Xubuntu, there is xfce out of the box. Regarding what the update looks like, you can read here .
I would not recommend Debian for the desktop. You will collect a lot of rakes with the inability to install newer software.

Answer 4

1) minimalistic in my understanding is Damn Small Linux. I think you are talking about something else.
2) new stable versions are released very rarely (about once every 2 years), I found only 4 releases. But I do not remember any problems with a standard upgrade.
3) Where did he die? So much so that it's being considered the default in the next stable release of debian.

Answer 5

elementary OS

Answer 6

I will speak out in support of Elementary OS . I've been sitting on it for half a year, I still haven't seen any special problems, everything works with a bang and the design cannot but rejoice. I advise.

Answer 7

1) I think you can find something more minimalistic, I personally chose Debian Stable as a fast, stable and problem-free system (I have been sitting for 2 years and have no serious problems, although with ubuntu, for example, problems started immediately after installation).
2) There are no problems between stable releases, we change the name of the release in the config, enter apt-get update, apt-get upgrade into the console and get a new distribution kit, no reinstallations (but it is necessary that the kernel does not have third-party blobs installed not from the repository and not deb packages.
3) XFCE is more alive than all the living, and it rules out, I couldn’t find anything better for myself (AMD Athlon 3200+, 2 GB RAM, nVIDIA GeForce 210, all kinds of KDE and GNOME on this godlessly slow down (this is really a masterpiece of shit coding, already on a single-core process slows down), and XFCE flies, and old games like stalkers and GTA plow under Vine no worse than they plowed under XP on the same config, and in some places even better, LXDE is a little unfinished, and awesome, openbox and the like are not bad, but require very strong literally finished everything for myself, this is if you want to set up and not just sit down and use it).