> The "no bugs" requirement is genuinely the only hard part here

I know, that's why I'm putting it front-and-center, and also indicating that initial setup and minimalism are sacrifices I'm willing to make.

I'm leaning more toward Fedora Atomic right now because of the fact that what you use is what someone tested.

That said, I've installed perfectly vanilla Ubuntu before and found what was objectively a bug within 20 minutes of clicking around to get it setup. So the "someone tested" part only works if there is actually someone testing it - and I get the feeling Canonical doesn't even boot their releases before sending them out.