Nice to hear from a current slackware user. Quite often these threads are populated by arch and gentoo users speculating or reminiscing about a time they used it once for a month while they were still in school.
sqlite is exactly what you want. You can even load a CSV file directly into a new table. Everything is a string, it's extremely fast and ubiquitous on moderns OS's.
A server hosting a copy of the repo, git send-email, a mailing list and a bugzilla instance is all that an open source project really needs.
The advantage of github/gitlab et al. is that it merges all of the above functionality to one place, however it's not absolutely essential. Git itself is extremely versatile and can be as useful as you are want it to be if you put in the time to learn it.
I'll concede that the logo is good but I found the package manager confusing. Also I like compiling packages from source so only a couple of distros allow me to fully dive into that. It's Gentoo for me, I'm afraid.
gnus on emacs
If you want to experience travelling back in time with an operating system then OpenBSD feels like a time capsule, albeit one which is still being maintained. I realise it is not linux but using it is very similar to what linux was like before 2010.
I think the LARP elements of this distro put me off trying it back in the day. Calling the package manager a "Grimoire" and having to "cast" packages to install them was just too much for me.
Agree, it's literally all I need for my browser in terms of add-ons. NoScript is nice to have but not essential.
I used scoop as my package manager on windows. It even lets you install gnu coreutils like ls, cat and find to run in powershell.
Emacs is the only app you'll ever need once you've mastered it.
Discord is closed source and has no way to easily archive/record conversations. This makes it unsuitable for a lot of open source projects who need a chat client. I've not used much Discord but potentially the "gamer" culture might put people off.
Matrix seems good but it's not quite there yet from what I can tell. It's got way more features than IRC but none of them seem to work that well. Like a swiss army knife full of blunt tools.
For IRC I'm on the libera.chat server. Usually hanging out in the gentoo channels since I use that distro. There are a lot of different channels for the various devs, user tech support, niche uses like gaming* and also offtopic chat channels.
*More gamers tend to use other linux distros for some reason
Careful with this one, it's an antique
Especially when Rust has limited support for less common architectures. This has been forcing distros like gentoo to drop support for more niche arches since many common packages like python-cryptography are now pulling in rust as a mandatory dep.