Yeah, more control. If a login screen hangs it takes drastic intervention to regain control.
I ran CP/M system on a 386. It came on 8 inch floppies.
Even had menus and a sort of a gui.
“Study the past if you would define the future.”
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I did the same before but now I have bashrc modded to start the window manager (wayland) after login. I also have cinnamon (xorg) as a backup if Wayland has issues. Then I just type startx.
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How do you get out if it hangs?
Use another tty maybe?
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If Sway/Hyprland crashes during login I’m already in the tty so just type startx
If I am using Sway/Hyprland and want to go cinnamon I press windows key+m to exit to tty and startx
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I don’t think I have a floppy drive anymore, but pretty sure I do have some floppies in the closet. Unless my wife has been in there without me knowing, which is possible.
You could start a new fashion trend bring them out… 
i have a drive in an external box I made for a client a few years back but he never turned up to collect its stored next to some zip disks from a mac I do have access to that drive and cannot remember why i kept them.
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I’d like to nominate Q4OS. It is lightweight and has excellent performance on older setups. I use it on my old Acer Aspire1 netbook, maxed out at 2GB RAM. With the Trinity desktop environment, it has a professional appearance, comes with Libre Office installed out of the box. and even has full hibernation enabled without the need to jump through multiple hoops to get it functional. I did manage to get hibernation working on my Linux Mint systems, but it was a major undertaking.
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OK… List of good distros that dont get a rating…acvording to your votes.
Puppy 3
Void 2
Gentoo 1
Slackware 1
Q4OS 1
and some vague mention of distros on floppies.
I notice Q4OS offers Trinity DE. I like that
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I nominate Alpine Linux. It has various ways to easily install a vm, a text based or X system, and best of all, it has rock solid 64 and 32 bit systems available for installation.
I actually set it up on a 20 year old Asus eeepc and it works well (I have it set up as a bedside alarm clock 
and pi-hole for a small home network)
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I agree that Alpine is super useful. We use it as a base for our containers, but I’ve never tried to run it on a laptop or even as a VM when running with a desktop environment. That should go on my ToDo list.
I think Ubuntu is underrated in some ways. It catches a lot of flack for being so corporate, but it serves as a base for many other distros. It’s pretty incredible.
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Ubuntu is such a solid base for all the drivers they provide out of the box.
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It is better known than some ofthe other nominations, because of its use in containers, buf yes , it makes a fine hard install. Chimera, which I have used, is based on Alpine.
Yeah, it is not just a container image.
So the votes now are
Puppy 3
Void 2
Alpine 2
Gentoo 1
Slackware 1
Q4OS 1
That is an interesting list .
Have you noticed that the entries are all non-systemd except Q4OS. Puppy can be either, depending on what it is based on.
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Actually 3 for Alpine, you, me, and Jackson
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I have already had my vote, it was Void.
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I usually work my way back to Peppermint Devuan, to avoid systemd and to stay in the Debian ecosystem. And, darn it, it just plugs along snappily and without problems. Another I might mention is the Emmabuntus implementation based on Debian. But it uses systemd.
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Sorry only one vote each . Peppermint is no 55 on distrowatch?.. I guess that is underrated.
It does not have to be non-systemd…I was just noting that.
So, updated list
Puppy 3
Void 2
Alpine 2
Gentoo 1
Slackware 1
Q4OS 1
Peppermint Devuan 1
Now some second mentions
Emmabuntus 1
Antix 1
Antix is my honorable second mention.
It is Debian based without systemd. It is a fine choice for older machines, especially laptops needing Wifi. It comes with a choice of window managers. It has a gui for service management.
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It is too popular to make this list.
It is about forgotten distros.
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I have had my vote on puppy but just worth mentioning
This distribution was designed to facilitate the refurbishment of computers donated to humanitarian associations, particularly to Emmaüs communities (hence its name) and to encourage beginners to discover GNU / Linux , but also to extend the lifespan of the hardware to limit waste caused by the overconsumption of raw materials.
Not many are written with this in mind.
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It’s way less “corporate” and feels more “democratic” than Red Hat EL 100%!
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I think it wins the Charity award.
There is a Linux distro called Accessible Coconut which was developed specifically for visually impaired persons.
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