Today I used the opposite approach. I began with Debian, next SuSE8, Knoppix, Aurox, Debian Sarge for lots of years, and, after OpenBSD, I use Hyperbola with a pretty sparse cwm with uxterm, links+, and for music/podcasts I use two scripts: sfeed_download, anonradio, tpradio and amused playing my collections at random.
No bling bling, almost no features with sfeed.