Indeed, Slackware, Void, or Arch. Or since the parent poster seems to be somewhat into scientific computing, NixOS could also be interesting. NixOS is like having virtualenvs for everything.
I'm in creative, but do a lot of graphics and video programming and research for fun and profit, as well as programming for the fun of it! One of these days I'm going to try Qubes OS and try playing with different OS' at the same time!