Interesting poll!
I moved from VSCode to Neovim a few months ago with Kickstart as my initial config, which is fairly basic distro compared to Lazy or AstroNvim. I’m slowly getting used to Vim motion and adding some plugins here and there.
But sometimes I’m wondering if I should have picked up a more “complete” distro to smooth the learning curve, on the other hand, this choice should pay me back on the long run.
Need an option for “no distro”.
I started with Vim, then jumped ship to NeoVim about a year ago. My ~/.vimrc has become an ungodly mess of Vimscript, some Lua, and a bunch of shortcuts/mappings that make my life easier.
I treat dot files as underwear:
I use parts of mini.nvim, but I do not use any “distribution” and I highly recommend against using any.
I tried switching to (Neo)Vim during the last almost 15 years several times and always failed. But this week it looks like is my first one when I am successfully using it almost exclusively.
What helped me was installing LazyVim and going through this book Chapter 1: Introduction and Installation - LazyVim for Ambitious Developers
Usually books focus on movements, text manipulation etc., but what I was missing was the real world scenarios like navigating files, projects, testing, debugging etc. This book address that pretty well. Highly recommended. 
LOL
Ya, I used Janus for a short time years ago. I copied and adapted what I liked from it. Same as sentiments above.
Another great way to learn Vim is to read peoples’ vimrcs. I have read a lot of them over the years, I also read a lot of ones that aren’t necessarily “good” but due to the highly configurable nature of Vim, people get all sorts of unique ideas and I don’t think I’ve ever not learned anything from reading them. Tangentially, this is the reason I really appreciate when people’s core config is in one big vimrc instead of being broken up. Lots of vimrcs read nicely from top to bottom.
Full agree here. I am aging and I am also still working on health so I have to be very wise with my energy expenditures and I have to prioritize my pursuits very aggressively. And I actually envy everyone around here for having the time, the energy and the desire to tinker with their editors. Ever since I landed on AstroNvim I had to customize it 3-4 times, took 10 minutes each time (actually super low-friction, much better than I expected) and I still rolled my eyes so hard that I was actually in danger of finally finding a brain in my head.
Since then I am super happy with it. Sure some bigger files and projects make it lag, it annoys me but it happens rarely enough for me to not care enough.
Huge props to @jswanner and the others for making me aware of nvim -u $stuff though! 
I absolutely will reach for it every now and then.
Oh damn, this is fantastic!
I didn’t know about it!
I went with LazyVim as well after a few attempts of setting up an environment I wanted and there was always something I missed or didn’t know how to do (skill issue 100%).
Started with my own minimal custom config in Neovim, to be in control and understand what I have running.
I used to use Vim a lot in the 2010s when I was working a lot in RoR but abandoned it for VSCode.
I had a couple weeks off during XMAS/New Year and fell down a rabbit hole setting up a new MBP and getting dotfiles setup. I ended up falling back in love with Vim through Neovim. I started out just tinkering with my own configs but quickly realized that the vast majority of my plugins were coming from Folke so I decided to give LazyVim a try. Absolutely love it. Out of the box it’s configured very nicely. If you’re into the IDE feel you’ll love LazyVim. I did end up disabling a few things that I felt took away from the “vim way” like Bufferline, etc. but now I feel like it’s perfect.
If I were (and I probably will down the road) go back to just rolling my own, I’d probably look into Kickstarter since it’s mostly a barebones setup and more of a way to help you configure your own.
