[jgtrosh]

“a barbones distro” ≠ “nothing installed”

Maybe you mean nothing more than what comes with the distro's install? In that case a clean Ubuntu counts? I think you should rethink what you have in mind; maybe you mean a distribution with few default packages and minimal preconfigured settings? Something like Arch?

[lphnull]

You're right, I probably used the wrong words there. By barebones distro, I actually meant "headless debian with minimal packages configured to fit nicely inside 1/3rd of a 32 Gb SD card". My main problem with Ubuntu is that even Xubuntu felt too bloated for me under raspberry pi. I can't even fit Xubuntu into a 64Gb SD card without running out of space. What do all those extra gigs do? They sure as hell don't make my rpI faster that's for sure.

[tomxor]

yeah, once you move away from any kind of "it comes preinstalled with a DE" type distro, moving to a headless barebones distro is easy, and you can mostly take your configs with you... xorg is also so frickin easy these days. I've yet to try something even more minimal like arch or.. from scratch! but maybe one day with enough time :)

I think The trick to helping others though is to show it can be done in stages, because trying to learn everything at once is too hard, it's easy to forget how long it took to acquire all of the knowledge and skill that make it seem easy to set up a bare bones linux distro into something comfortable and yet lightweight.

For most people I'd advise: Ubuntu (cos the web will help), then find your lightweight desktop of choice by installing and experimenting along side... then try to replicate it on barebones (or ubuntu server, mostly just involves adding xorg to your install list)... then experiment with more lightweight distros... and if tinkering with your desktop is not satisfying enough then you will no doubt go down the from scratch route as well eventually but at that point you don't need people telling you what to do. The thing that's lost with my seemingly simple suggestion is that you will learn so much by yourself while trying to achieve this, but without sacrificing your productivity.