Slackware is the happy medium I've found between BSD and Linux. It's unashamedly unix-like and uncomplicated, and has its own rich ports tree through Slackbuilds.
Slackware lost it's way when it tried to comepte with desktop distros but didn't really commit to it.
I used to like it as a minimal distro that just stayed out of my way and considered it oriented towards slightly more technical folk.
Then the community would be hostile if you were digging in to an issue and didn't do a full install because that's the recommended way. And not doing so would also result in stupid issues due to stupid dependencies like mplayer not working because samba was not installed.
Alpine is an improvement over Slackware in every way.
It was my first linux, but I haven't used it in ages. I never found installing from source tgz to be that bad, but dep trees have gotten much deeper over time. I don't think windowmaker had clipboard support when I left it. There is something nice about knowing what every file in your system is for, and being able to read most of them with ed. Alpine scratches that itch for me. I try to sub in anything with a rust equivalent I can. Building rust may have deep trees, but with musl the only runtime dep is usually the kernel itself.
I used to like it as a minimal distro that just stayed out of my way and considered it oriented towards slightly more technical folk.
Then the community would be hostile if you were digging in to an issue and didn't do a full install because that's the recommended way. And not doing so would also result in stupid issues due to stupid dependencies like mplayer not working because samba was not installed.
Alpine is an improvement over Slackware in every way.