I’d probably go with Mint XFCE or those listed, or you can search for distros that target older hardware. I’ll get back to yo on that.

Edit: so, @thatonecoder@lemmy.ca, my main search was focusing on minimal distros for old hardware (less that 1 GiB of RAM that support x86 (i.e. 32 bit)), these may fit the bill: Tiny Core, Puppy, Porteus, Absolute, antiX, Q4OS, Slax, Sparky, MX, Bohdi, Zorin Lite, Xubuntu, Archbang, Slitaz, DSL.
From here on we’re on “may need ≥ 1 GiB” territory: Lubuntu, Lite, MATE, Peppermint, LXLE, LMDE, bunsenlabs, Crunchbang++, EasyOS.

Again, my focus was on low RAM usage and preferably supporting x86. Most distros aren’t Wayland-ready yet, bare that in mind.
As most said, Mint with XFCE is a good start and most distros offer a “live” version you can boot to try without installing.

Reminds me of the 56K handshake.

Wrong target audience, Bob.

A few paragraphs would do wonders for the legibility of your post.

Uses sqlite as repo backend

And it’s used by the SQLite project.

GitHub is a company owned by Microsoft (in the USA). They allow you to host git repositories there (a git forge) and they use your code to train their AI.

GitLab is another git forge, you can also host your code there. I think it was also bought off.

Forgejo is git forge software. If you want to use a git forge that relies on Forgejo, checkout CodeBerg (based in Germany). Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which is a fork of Gogs.

<rant> All of these tend to offer not only a git forge but also other crap like tickets and CI/CD in what i personally see as feature creep. </rant>

the only feature I look in monitors these days

Not being smart.

is there a future where this isn’t the case? And what would be required to get there?

Hardware manufacturers of companies in a position of power who leverage it. Like Valve.

Are we just waiting for them to give a shit?

Speak with your money. They won’t care though, the linux market is minimal.

As a TV for your kitchen?

Works everywhere -available as Flatpak

Don’t you mean Works everywhere where Flatpak is available?

I have no access and, it seems, neither does local IT. Yay.

At the moment i’m getting mount error(13): Permission denied at the new vm (where i was attempting to mount).
dmesg has

[ 9254.003440] CIFS: Attempting to mount \\10.10.10.10\dir\\dir2
[ 9254.181314] CIFS: Status code returned 0xc000006d STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE
[ 9254.181333] CIFS: VFS: \\10.10.10.10 Send error in SessSetup = -13
[ 9254.181367] CIFS: VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -13

Attempting to ls the share in the other vm where it was previously working yields Host is down.
(Everyone else can access the share just fine.)

From my searching around for something similar, these showed up the most: TinyCore, Puppy, Porteus, Absolute, antiX (there’s more).

how to install bare arch?
You can try Slackware.
Or LFS for a full zero-to-hero experience.

I install the minimal version and go from there.

I think Ubuntu offers ZFS in the installer now, so not really, just go to the advanced options.

I don’t even remember i use it, on Gentoo, RAIDZ1.

However, if something goes wrong, and they do the wrong thing, we want to be able to send out some kind of command or similar, that will completely lock, block, or wipe the sensitive data.

You’re assuming you’ll have a network connection and that sensitive data is all in the same place.

Short of remotely unlocking an encrypted disk on every single boot… and even then…

XFCE for the aforementioned reasons and not depending on gnome. Xmonad otherwise.

Install the headless version, no GUI:

${EDITOR} /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99noRecommends
APT::Install-Recommends "0";
APT::Install-Suggests "0";

and then run apt update.

Then install fluxbox session manager, oughta be enough.