What is a good x86 Linux OS similar to the Pyra to get familiar with?

[PowerGod]

I just booted an old virtual machine that runs a minimal Wheezy system. It only has the main repo in it's sources.list. It is in fact so minimal that it has no X installed.
After installing alsa and mplayer I could play mp3 files with no problems.

I see no reason why that should be any different with a full desktop including alsa and some audio player pre-installed, especially because I know I've played mp3 files on Wheezy systems that I ran on bare metal.

I don't use Debian anymore, and I don't want to make a VM just to try, but doing a little research seems to me that those codecs were added not so much time ago (seems like 1 or 2 years), and also I still see a lot of guides online about how to add them to Debian, with recent thanking from people...
Also I'm not sure is mplayer uses it's own codecs or system wide ones.

Anyway, a great lack is still the DVD codec... but seems like something in common with Windows 10 as I heard.

For what I had to do at the time, before adding the multimedia repo I wasn't able to do anything music/video related, and seemed so inferior to Windows