Linux

PopOS. It was the easiest to get my Nvidia GPU set up and plays all the games that I wanna play without too much pain. I've been meaning to try something like Arch with KDE, something like what my SteamDeck is using... but I don't wanna fuck around setting up Arch.

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 😄

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

Arch. I had some tinkering with other distros in the past but wanted to configure pretty much everything. Running it with Cinnamon. I love pacman and AUR and have been able to not break it so far after a year of being installed which is a new record for me 😂

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.

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

I use NixOS, Gentoo, and Debian:

• NixOS because I like declarative configuration files.
• Gentoo because I enjoy compiling from source.
• Debian because the other two are more difficult to use.

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.

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.

Bazzite, I want my PC to just work and not require me to maintain it, on top of that I need it to be game-ready and have good color management for work related stuff.

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.

Plain old Fedora.

I know the hurdles, i know what to expect, and I've never been surprised by it.

Immutable sounds nice, AUR sounds nice, NixOS sounds nice, but i am utterly confident in my current choice's reliability and comfortable with its idiosyncracies. Everything i want to do works very well.

If i had less time/energy or had to switch, Kubuntu would be my second choice. Less frequent updates and fewer creature comforts, but also very reliable.

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.

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.

I just installed Pop!_OS 22.04, after finally ditching Windows 11 entirely. I picked it because it seemed easy to use, well suited for gaming, and popular with good support.

So far, everything has been great!

Been using Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment for a few years now. Does everything I need it to.

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.

I have Bazzite on a laptop for the ease of use and general resistance to breakage, and Spiral Linux in a VM. The latter works flawlessly that way, like it was always meant to be in a VM.

Gentoo because I like it.

And portage.

I recently installed OpenSuse, I have been using FreeBSD mostly, but have used linux through the years. I decided to go with an rpm based distro and I've always likes the chameleon mascot of Suse. I'm used to Debian based linux, so it's been a slight adjustment but it's been nice and smooth. I'm running Tumbleweed right now and all my Steam games work, as well as my 3d Windows applications via wine. It just works* I am too old and tired to spend time tweaking anymore.

Because the logo is cool :)

I use NixOS for my desktop because ~~I hate myself~~ you can configure everything without needing to edit a bunch of different config files that use different configuration languages.

I use Arch btw for my Minecraft server because I am crazy.

A few for different use cases. NixOS on my wife's 14 year old laptop because it proved to handle the hardware the best, and she struggles with change so if that system dies the NixOS configuration can be redeployed identical to how she had it with no additional effort.

Debian on my old IOmega NAS.

OpenSUSE on my personal PC and Work computer, since it supports my proprietary CAD software, and nVidia releases a driver specifically for SUSE/OpenSUSE use.

I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can't be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.

So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.

COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.

Debian. Used to use others but realized they all just added crap I didn't want, or could add myself with a simple script.

I was a Slackware then Fedora, then Ubuntu as my daily drivers (whipe trying other distros, or Kali for specific purposes) before settling here.

Mint for my desktop system. It just does exactly what I want it to, has good compatibility with software and Cinnamon is my DE of choice.

NixOS for my server, because being able to use one config repo and format for everything is so nice.

Mint pleb on desktop because it's stable and just works, bazzite on steam deck for installing my own games.

Lubuntu

My first foray into unix-likes was oprnbsd with fluxbox. I eventually moved to openbox. Lubuntu with lxqt gives a nice simple openbox experience with a menu and stuff. I customize it to have openbox present the mouse menu instead of the whole pcmanfm desktop thing.

Arch, pacman is why

Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I've used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I'm comfortable with it and it's supported in every cloud environment I've touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)

I've got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I'd go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don't find much of a difference beyond package management.

Mint, because it seems like the easiest OS for someone who doesn't know wtf a flatpak is

The other hard drive has Windows, because Fusion360 doesn't work on Linux. Hey Autodesk, can you hear me? Make it happen please