Linux

Tuxedo OS. Same idea as smth like mint or PopOs but (imo) done much better. It also has rolling release for some stuff (like the DE) and non-rolling for other stuff (not even sure what bc I don't really look in detail). It also uses KDE plasma my favorite (and imo the best) DE. It's got pretty good app availability in terms of official packages because it is based on Ubuntu LTS (now 24.04). There are a couple things that are vestigial on most computers bc it was made for tuxedo computers but these have no negative effect on other devices in my experience.

NixOS because all the other ones differ about as much as Windows 10 from Windows 11. Guix doesn't count.

Different distros for different uses:

• Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
• Nobara for my main gaming PC.
• Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
• Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.

Alpine:

• Rolling release (Alpine Edge) yet stable
• Extremely lightweight
• Very customizable
• After setting it up I find that it works very well
• Decently sized repo
• OpenRC rather then SystemD (I prefer the way it handles services)

I use Ubuntu because it's the most popular and well-supported.

I'm going to be switching to Mint at some point because it's basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don't trust Canonical anymore, but it's hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I've been using Ubuntu since 2017.

I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I'm going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.

Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it's easy.

Fedora with GNOME.

I've been using it for over than 10 years in my main computer.

It simply works, it's nice, fresh packages, stable, GNOME is productivity champion (at least I know all the shortcuts, and how to tweak it to my daily use). I also know how to build and manipulate RPM packages, so it's pretty convenient.

Debian. Because it's the best about "Just Works" (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.

BUT I'm also not a "numbers go up" geek. I don't give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that's just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).

If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.

(/soapbox)

My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don't play the latest games anyway, I'm a PatientGamer, and I don't do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.

It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don't have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).

It all works fine, but one day I'll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs

Fedora.

I've tried them all but found it's the most reliable. It's upgrades are even more reliable than Macos and Windows.

Packages are very up to date but also well tested. Sometimes even newer than Arch for short periods.

The community is awesome.

I love Gnome, I've found it's more consistent than even MacOs in its design. And it has perfect keyboard shortcuts.

Arch.

Because of pacman. Building and writing packages is simple and dependencies are slim. Also packages are recent. And most likely "there is an AUR package for that". Also stack transitions arrive early, like pipewire.

Also let's not forget Arch Wiki, i bet you have read it as a non Arch user.

I administer Arch on 8 machines including gaming rigs, home server, web server, kids laptop, wifes gaming desktop, audio workstation and machine learning rig and a bunch of dev laptops. I also use ArchARM on RPi for some home automation.

Never considered switching since I switched from Ubuntu over 15 years ago.

I do have experience with several other rpm and apt based distros.

For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.

For my gaming PC, I've got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I'd either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I'd just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I'm doing on there

Debian and Linux Mint.

Debian for mission critical stuff like servers or things I don't want to futz with, like HTPCs, work machines, etc.

Mint for my gaming desktop because it's a bit newer on kernels and such.

Fedora because it's stable and effective.

I'm currently using bazzite due to its really solid out of the box support for gaming hardware and peripherals.

I'm really surprised everyone uses arch. I have three theories as to why:

1. There actually aren't that many arch uses but when arch users have the opportunity they won't hesitate to say "BTW I use arch" were as others don't really bother.
2. There are lots of arch users and everyone uses it because they want to be able to say "BTW I use arch"
3. (Very unlikly) There are lots of arch users and it's because it's actually a good distro that people like.

(This is mostly a joke jsyk I'm sure arch is a great distro)

Ubuntu, because I'm fine with something that "just works"

Fedora. I like the rolling release but with large updates separated into point releases, as well as the ability to perform offline updates. I also like the preinstalled security stuff

PCLinuxOS.

Stable and rolling for regular people OS.

Bazzite for personal stuff because it looked neat and just worked after installation with a small learning curve. Due to interia I went with bluefin on the work computer for the same reasons

Mint on my ancient MacBook because I didn’t really know any better and it’s working just nice for me, and Asahi/Fedora on my M1 mini, because it’s the only option.

I use LMDE. I use it because Mint has proved that it is worth using (for example: it provide easy way to install multimedia codec by only click "Install Multimedia Codec" in applications menu) and I want it to success.

Sorry if my english is bad

LMDE. It really does just work.

Endeavour OS because once you go rolling you can never go back.

I use Bazzite so that it matches with my Steam Deck since SteamOS still isn't an actual distro to play with yet...

I've been using Bazzite for a few months now (switched from EndeavourOS, which was great) and it's been amazing. I'm sold on atomic/immutable. I have never had a PC this stable, including every Windows PC I've had.

And it's perfect for gaming. There are weird little tweaks and settings that I had to do on EOS to get my GPU working correctly, etc., and they all just work out of the box in Bazzite (I did get the iso image made specifically for my laptop, which definitely helps). It's super impressive actually.

And distrobox (BoxBuddy comes installed) can be used to access the AUR or whatever if I feel the need to. Just fire up an Arch box, and have at it.

2 flavors of Fedora with KDE on it:

1. Aurora-DX for some dev work on the side. Once you get used to distroboxing / devcontainers, it's rock-solid and mean dev environment (saw some minor issues with how certain GUI apps were scaled, but that's about it).
2. Nobara for gaming (tried Bazzite and it'd prolly work for that purpose as well).

Unfortunately, had to keep Windows on one other machine (fuck you KORG for not providing anything working on Linux), but that's limited to being a glorified music player now 😄

I used to use Arch btw.

Now I am on Nix, I just love shell.nix files. I haven't spent much time on my configs yet, but once I finish them, they'll be super easy to set up again, thats cool.

Tuxedo OS. Before that, I was very happy with Fedora, and then I got a tuxedo laptop and tried their distro. Now, I keep using that because I started to enjoy KDE, and I really like their hardware support and how they test and maintain the distro.

Fedora KDE.

I was happily using Windows 10 until a few months ago, but needed to build a new PC. I got a glimpse of Windows 11 on a friend's laptop and didn't like it. So I asked my Linux-friend which distribution he would recommend to someone who wants to try Linux, but doesn't want to stray too far away from the windows look and feel.

MX Linux. It is Debian with setup and tools I really want but would be too lazy to prepare in one go. Love it as much as I love Debian.

Bazzite for my gaming pc, steam deck, and family members. It just works and they cant fuck it up. Even brother laser printers official drivers installed for my mom's comp. Gotta check the details of that cups exploit though. My gamig pc is also the fallback pc I expect to always have working and for servicing any others if problems come up.

Arch or arch based, except manjaro which has screwed me over too many times, for having easy access to pretty much any software that can run on linux, or just stuff that requires too many hoops to jump through to get working on atomic distros like bazzite.

Dietpi on my SBCs like the ones running klipper for my 3d printers

Debian for my servers, homeassistant etc, but I'm planning on checking out coreos.

Also alpine just because.

Fedora 41 KDE at home on my daily driver laptop and desktop.

Antix on my dell mini netbook.

Multi machine VMs I manage at work run on red hat enterprise with no DE or WM.

My web app servers at work run Ubuntu server 24 LTS with no DE or WM.

My home lab runs on fedora 41 server, no DE or WM.