Loki distributed alpha centauri if I remember correctly? Awesome game. The windows version is actually easier to run on Linux than the original Linux release nowadays.

From my perspective, anything pre-ubuntu was a colossal ballache for a desktop system. I played around with suse, mandrake, etc prior to that but getting things working often felt like a chore.

I'm a huge advocate for Arch on desktop machines, but it's probably not ideal for a server running on a RPi unless you particularly enjoy babysitting it.

I used Dietpi in the past but I've had best luck recently with the official Pi OS Lite. Hardware support is perfect; any software you may run is likely tested using the official distro so idiosyncratic issues pop up less often; plus general community support is excellent.