My git repos, some of which just mirror other projects, others which are private to me, would be opened up to the public, except for code that isn't mine to relicense as GPL. Other data released publically via webservers would include archival data of various rare tv, books, etc that I have collected.

Emails, banking stuff, and all that would go to the appropriate family members.

Agreed. Also, https://github.com/damentz/zen-kernel

With the kernel it's almost always fairly mainstream changes - security patches, upstream stuff, BFS, whatever. With the userland, I see patches only when necessary on something like Gentoo or Arch... With Ubuntu though, it's a nightmare.

Real world example: I develop with the Nightingale Media Player. While setting it up to use the current taglib, we managed to get it to work just fine with the taglib shipped with about every distro you can imagine...except Ubuntu. Some patch they have going on there completely breaks the build, as well as playback and tag parsing.

Unfortunately not.

Linux is in fact, fairly standard, short of the init system and sometimes the system layout you use. Ubuntu is a bit of an exception since it follows Shuttleworth's whims instead of established norms. Furthermore, it's size on disk doesn't matter if it runs 50 daemons and eats up a bunch of CPU time at idle.

If you really want lightweight and have a specific purpose in mind, just use something that only gives you what you want/need based on what you install. Then, localepurge.

It's also nonstandard in terms of all the stupid patches and daemons it comes with.

Mod parent up! Ubuntu sucks.