[xorcist]

Here's a somewhat serious suggestion: Slackware

It's a modern Linux, closely follows upstream projects, and when you wonder how to set up some network configuration or something else you just open the script in question and it's mostly obvious.

It's a small community so hasn't got the same amount of eyeballs and might not always be as quick with security fixes as the bigger projects, but it might be a bit of stale, old, yet somehow fresh air for the author.