[Image description: A fox-woman wearing a dress the color of the Debian logo is being pulled by the sleeves on one side by a gnu man and on the other side bu a penguin. She has an annoyed expression. The gnu man says: “Debian, why do you offer a non-free firmware repo? You’re so close to being one of the few fully free distros… Don’t you believe in free software?”
The penguin says: “Why isn’t the necessary firmware installed by default ? It’s such a pain when you install and it can’t connect to network… You’re so close to being practical, Debian !” ]
I am a very early Linux adopter (Red Hat Halloween) and I remember standing up my system piece by piece. It was fun back then but now I’ve got better things to do. Now I just install Pop!_OS and I am 98% of the way there.
If I was in my early twenties again, and trying to learn and tinker, then I would absolutely be running Arch or full FOSS Debian build. Either would be running only the absolute necessary software and nothing more. Just like I use to do it back in the day.