Linux

openSUSE, because of the snapshotting. It's zero-setup and just gives peace of mind when doing upgrades, as I can roll back even from the bootloader.

Fedora. Reason is probably that im used to it now. But if I have to make some points why then there they are:

• nice balance between being up-to-date and not bleeding edge
• new technologies. Fedora always pushes new technologies first such as wayland, pipewire, systemd... I like it. I dont have to wait 2 years until x distro rolls it. I get it now, sometimes with some problems but nothing that i couldnt manage.
• When im trying out some software or building from source the documentation often includes specific steps for fedora (among debian, ubuntu and arch). Its really nice to not be a niche distro and get instructions tailored for fedora. Also some pre build packages are often in deb and rpm. -im used to dnf and its few handy commands like dnf history etc. Im sure that other package managers offer similar solutions but i know dnf and it feels like home

Fedora Silverblue because I seem to break any system I have eventually, and this one’s still going.

Using void linux because it has no systemd init system (it uses its own "runit" init system) ; and it is a natutal development after using Debian for a long time and wanting to understand more about gnu/linux system.

Also, it is very reliable with a lot of packages. It is standard enough so using info from arch, debian or other distro works.

But the origin was I could not understand how systemd was managing the system and it felt really contrived to go around it, so I began using void and that's the story.

Mint: consistency, versatility, having all the Ubuntu's benefits (being industry standard, somewhat) without the drawbacks (Canonical's opinionated bullshit like snap)

Debian: stability, predictability, leanness

Gentoo: customizability down to compile-time level

I currently use Bazzite on my old laptop, just wanted to try out immutable distros and I like to stream games from my rig to it sometimes so completely functional steam was a nice addition. Plus learning about flatpaks and app images over installed packages has been interesting.

Then on my servers Debian/Proxmox and usually Ubuntu server in LXCs for more updated APTs then Debian, though I mostly run docker for my web apps rather then native APTs.

I work for a company that has a java program that functions on Linux but is nowhere near the level of support provided for mac/Windows, so I'm the Linux guy for our dept and when a customer is running into issues on a distro I'll spin up a vm on my homelab and see if I can rum through an install and get it functional.

So far the only one I literally couldn't get installed was Slackware lol I even figured out how to get it functional in ChromeOSes Linux subsystem.

I've been using Arch since October 2019 and I've stuck with it because it has been a really comfortable experience. I really love the package manager. The packages are usually new enough to not cause me any major problems but are tested enough to not break anything. Regarding the latter point, mileage might vary. I have never had anything break on me that I haven't broken myself (and I don't update very frequently) though I know not everybody is sharing that experience.

1 year ago I also started using NixOS on my desktop and it's been a very interesting experience. Design wise it's pretty good but there are a number of things that really annoy me. Some days I'm really considering putting NixOS on my laptop and some days I'm leaning more to putting Arch back on my desktop.

debain, with xfce if i need a desktop. mostly because i started on xubuntu. started learning sysadmin stuff when all i could afford was a potato with salvaged computer components shoved in it. xfce considered that excessively over powered. ended up loving the way i set up my xfce env, and probably wont change it much over the next 20yrs because theres no need. so when cononical got extra gross it was easy to just move to debian and carry on with my life.

Over the past few years I went from using Debian Stable, to Debian Testing-Unstable mix (this is a supported way of using Debian look it up), to Debian Unstable/Sid on my main PC.

I think they all can be used for different purposes, and because they all use basically the exact same tools and utilities I don't have to fiddle with figuring out the specific commands I need to run if I need to tweak a server.

I use Arch (btw) because CachyOS was giving me issues.

Debian because it's what I picked when I started, and switching sounds annoying

It was the first one using Wayland by default that worked on my machine out of the box.

Gentoo for my workstation because I need flexibility, security and stability there and Debian stable for my Raspberries running all the services I need 24/7 access to.

I don't like all the spin-offs of the major distros. And no, Ubuntu is not a major distro it is based on Debian and they are known for some really bad decisions in past and present, eg: snap instead of flatpak.

Debian stable (ok, writing this on Debian Trixie which is not stable yet, but nonetheless works w/o trouble in a virtual machine).

I am using Debian for work and on my servers.

Why Debian? Because for my use cases there are no real alternatives at this moment.

• I need stable support for Aarch64 and AMD64, which already rules out nearly every other distribution
• For desktops I use a highly customized Gnome, which takes some work and my workflow depends on a few plugins, which rules out Fedora
• For work I need some 3rd party software repositories which again rule out fast moving distributions and other non mainstream distributions
• By now I think I run Debian and distributions based on Debian for nearly 3 decades, everything I need works stable and good enough at this moment and I accumulated a lot of knowledge about how things work in Debian
• Some of my hardware needs workarounds (not because it is too new), and again I know my way around Debian and how to patch/fix things for my hardware
• It is nice that I can use Debian for my desktops and my servers on all hardware I own, I would not want to have to learn different Linux systems for desktops and servers or have different versions of software (think Fedora vs. RHEL/CentOS/Alma etc.)

Every 6 month I'll boot Fedoras live cd and play around with the newest Gnome/KDE, but seriously, for at least the last 5 years I never feel like essential improvements are pushed in the newest iterations of Gnome/KDE and I can happily wait the maximum of 2 years until they are released with Debian.

Saying that, I also own a Steam Deck and as an entertainment/media station I totally love what Valve is doing there. I would also be totally happy to run a De-Googled ChromeOS if it would support all the platforms/software etc. I need. For containers I'll also happily use Alpine Linux, if it is possible, but again, I'll mostly default to Debian simply because I know my way around.

In the end, an operating system is just a necessary evil to allow me to do what I want to do with a computer. As long as I have a stable OS which I can tweak to my liking/needs automatically and central package management, I am good. (Unless it is your hobby to play around with your operating system ;-)).

I use Debian-Testing. It's very stable, more so than most other distros IMHO (despite being -testing), and it has the latest packages.

I use my distro because my Arch friend in true Arch user fashion needed to remind me every day that I was using a Debian based distro. He'd rave about pacman being far superior to apt-get. Every time I couldn't find some software I was looking for, he'd point it out on the AUR.

I had just swapped to Pop_OS!, so I grabbed Manjaro just to get him to stop. I fully expected to be back on Pop at some point, but I'd give it some time. After about a month I didn't want to deal with the hassle of swapping again. That didn't last long as the distro hop urge set in. So I tried EndeavourOS, because I kept hearing bad things about Manjaro.

Then I went back to Windows for a while because a game I was looking forward to playing wasn't Linux supported yet. The game wound up being shit and Microsoft dropped news of their shady snapshot crap and putting ads in the start bar. By this time my Arch knowledge outweighed my Debian knowledge. Fedora and openSUSE were still intimidating, so back to Endeavour I went.

I broke my build and decided to try another distro, CachyOS. It was nice, clean, and fast, but the miscommunication with foss devs was high because Cachy mirrors update a fair deal slower than the Arch/AUR mirrors do, so I'd be making bug reports of a bug that was fixed two days prior. I thought about using Reflector, but didnt know where to even begin to implement it into Cachy. So now I sit on vanilla Arch and he's using vanilla Debian. What a world...

Ubuntu LTS because I don't have to fight with it

Debian Sid, the unstable rolling release branch of Debian. It has the worst of both Debian and Arch!

On a more serious note, it allows me to have a somewhat standard Debian system with bleeding edge tooling.

trisquel and I love it

PC: Cachyos love the aur and the compiler optimizations + they compile or put aur packages in their repos which saves time by not making you compile anything

Laptop: Linux mint easy to use and stable

Phone: Android (does it count??)

Arch (EndeavourOS but it's the same with an installer, basically): AUR, great Wiki, great community and fresh packages. I'm always open to new stuff but all of this is really hard to beat.

CachyOS! I was on Mint before this and had a bunch of issues running games. I think this was in part from going from NVIDIA to AMD (9070 XT).

Decided I had enough and instead of doing a simple Mint reinstall, I gave Cachy a go. I’ve had a little issue here and there but the experience has been beautifully smooth compared to Mint. It’s now set up better than I had it before and I’m over the moon with it haha.

LMDE because it's Mint and a recent Debian stable.

I eventually decided on openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few reasons: rolling release, because I like to stay up-to-date; non-derivative, not a fork or dependent on other underlying distros; European, for (perceived) privacy reasons; a relatively well known and large distro with a decent community, for troubleshooting reasons; backed by a company, though that has both its ups and downs; lastly, support for KDE Plasma.

I actually had trouble finding a distro that suited all my criteria at the time, but openSUSE is good enough for now and I am pretty much satisfied.

I used the big ones, ubuntu, arch, opensuse and (atomic) fedora. Fedora had the nicest out of box experience. Morover, I moved to podman, systemd, selinux, etc. And the atomic version showed me a new workflow with flatpak and distrobox (nowadays, I use nix oftentimes).

The best part about it is that I do not care about the system anymore. I do not even interact with it. I don't install packages (besides the base layer and minimal modifications that are long lasting like installing openssl for GNOME iirc)

I use mainly flatpaks, if I need aur, I fire up distrobox, or use nix if I want to. And the best part is, I'd have the exact same workflow even without the atomic version. Even on another distro. I do not interact with it much.

Moreover, I am happy with all the choices fedora made with the base package and images. I do not have to do an informed choice like on arch. It just updates whenever I boot my pc. I do not need to read updates, they are just there, somewhere. I do not need to disable snaps or work around weird choices. I just start firefox, vscodium, a terminal and do whatever I want to do.

Edit: I actually wanted to switch back to opensuse just to support it but I guess I'd rather move to nix some day. Maybe with niri and cosmic.

debian bc i want a rock solid system that i don't have to worry about maintaining and i don't give a fuck about the most recent versions of stuff

Pop OS

Lots of people were hyping it in 2019/2020 so I thought I'd give it a try as my first real Linux experience. It works great and has a Nvidia driver option when I need that. So I never really tried to switch.

Distro hoping never appealed to me, but I did try Fedora, Manjaro, Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian 12.

I use Kali for work and considered swapping to XFCE DE but pop is fine.

Mint on my work PC, because my dear IT colleagues made the effort to provide standardized installations for us that are mostly carefree and can just be used; you can even get them preinstalled on a laptop or VM.

Debian on my work servers, because everyone is using it (we're a Debian shop mostly) and there's a standardized self service PXE boot installation for it. Also, Debian is boring, and boring is good. And another thing, Debian is the base image for at least half of the Docker images and alliances (e.g. Proxmox) out there, so common tools. The .deb package format is kinda sane, so it's easy to provide our own package, and Debian has a huge community, so it's going nowhere in the near future.

Ubuntu LTS latest on my home servers, because I wanted "Debian but more recent packages", and it has served me well.

Not yet, but maybe Fedora on my private PC and laptop soon, because I keep hearing good things re hardware support, package recency, gaming and just general suitability for desktop use. There's still the WAF to overcome, so we'll see.

I dual boot Fedora KDE and Arch.

I've used Mint before and I've little to no qualms with it, but I wanted to move away from X-11, which has no GUI isolation. Hence the switch to Fedora, which has a smooth Wayland experience and also happens to have SELinux out-of-the-box.

I started on Ubuntu, tried 8.04 and went back to windows XP, tried 10.04 and stayed.

20.04 was my last Ubuntu, bounced around for a while, but I have settled on Mint. Been running it for 3 years now.

Mint isn't too fancy, it is just there and lets me get my work done, very much the way Ubuntu used to be.

I'm running the 6.14.2 kernel, to get the latest drivers for my RX 9070, I'm playing around with local AI.... Mint isn't fancy, but you can do almost anything you want.

CachyOS is making my old ass 2012 desktop feeling snappy again. I'm by no means a pro user and everything seems to work and god damn installing and updating stuff is easy and fast!