In a world of big company bad, I feel like Valve often strikes a fair balance.

Excellent from my point of view, however my use case is niche and my installation is headless and as bare bones as it gets.

I recently revived a circa-2014 Thinkserver with a core install of antiX, and was pleasantly surprised. I went for the smallest footprint possible by installing only the core distro, and then choosing the packages I wanted/needed.