void was good, but i didn't find it was practical for me to get an idea of where things were going. i'm not willing to rely solely on irc as it appears it is a requirement to give away one's ip address to all participants of a channel (or server) and that's not really something i'm comfortable with.
mint is something i've used before (though quite a while back). unfortunate that it uses systemd, but one can't have everything i suppose.