Linux

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.

Garuda on desktop:

• wanted to try Arch
• is rolling
• has a custom KDE theme that I happen to like
• gaming edition preinstalls a number of tools that I would install anyway

Fedora on work laptop:
20 years ago it was easier to find rpm packages for some enterprise apps, then just stuck with it

ChimeraOS on minipc:
does couch gaming well

CachyOS, because I wanted something arch based due to the archi wiki and rolling releases.

My media boxes run Ubuntu, but that will change when they get rebuilt/replaced at some point, most likely to Debian

I can set everything up from two config files. If I want to set up something on my laptop I got working on my desktop it's just cut and paste.

Guess my distro

Laptop is Linux Mint, because my wife also use it and i want my laptop to be as easy to handle as possible.

Servers are Debian, because it's very light on my hardware. Mostly used for containers.

PopOs! Familiarity, stability and the fact that it fulfils 95% of my needs perfectly.

I'm well past the age where distrohopping is "cool" (and I don't have the time for it anymore). So I take a pragmatic approach to choosing which distro to install on my systems.

• Fedora Workstation on my main laptop because it's the distro that works better on it, it has reasonably up-to-date software without the hassle and problems sometimes present with rolling releases, and I really like the native GNOME workflow.
• Linux Mint XFCE on my spare laptop because it only has 6GB of RAM (I plan to upgrade it, but it's not a priority right now) and sometimes I lend it to my mother and nephew, and XFCE is a very easy to use DE. Also, LM is stable and does not cause unnecessary problems, and has support for the laptop's touchscreen right out of the box.
• Debian 12 LXQt on a netbook which I use occasionally, mainly when I'm feeling like just browsing Gopher and Gemini.
• Debian 12 32-bit headless on my home server, which is just an old netbook I got for free. I have my music collection on it, which I listen to via MPD. It also serves as the main node of my Syncthing setup.

I've used many others in the past (Arch, Endeavour, openSuse, Slackware, Slax, etc.), but right now I think that the Fedora-Debian-Mint combo is the best for my needs.

Arch because I wanted to see what the hype about installing it was about and then i just kept it

Every single time I try something new I reinstall Fedora within a day, pretty sure it's just Stolkholm Syndrome at this point

I use openSUSE because I want to see the license used with a package before installing it, and I can do that by using YaST. Also, it seems that version numbers are used consistently which enables elegant downgrading (I found that the pacman system is probably capable of supporting this too, but the operating system(s) that use it don't seem to use version numbers consistently and I've had a bad experience with downgrading in the past). I reviewed packaging systems other than rpm but it seemed that rpm while used with openSUSE was the most robust.

I also like having a bootable image with a streamlined installation process that is clearly supported by the operating system maintainers: I was tired of worrying about whether I set up LUKS correctly while setting up Arch Linux, and just having a checkbox for "encrypt the disk" makes me a lot calmer. Knowing that I can use a guided process if I want to reinstall the operating system also gives me some peace of mind.

It's also nice to get practice with an operating system that is more similar to "enterprise" Linux distributions: it's probably useful to get practice managing my personal computer(s) and at the same time get knowledge that is probably re-usable while interacting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise itself. However, this was not a primary consideration for choosing an operating system for myself.

Luckily, my choice can currently also get some support from https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/

I also like NixOS, but it doesn't seem to use secure boot by default, and I'd prefer to have that handled without needing input from me, so I only use it when that feature isn't available at all.

Started with Linux Mint. Added the KDE desktop. And I'm done. This distro does everything I want.

Home: Arch, because I'm a lazy ass who likes the AUR.

Work: Ubuntu, because the laptop they gave me came with it

Servers: I don't have a particular distro I use for all my servers, it depends on what's my frame of mind when setting the server up. But I'm considering learning NixOS for this use case.

Variants and derivates of Debian on my servers and other headless devices because no reason except I know it, it is stable, it works.

Been trying linux for desktop every five-ten years for the last twenty odd years and went back to Windows every time because it was too bad experience despite I really tried to like it.

Except this time.

Fedora KDE on my laptop, soon on my stationary as well. No more Windows for me.

Vanilla Arch, because for me it's the easiest to use and everything just works and never any had instability issue like other distros I tried

Laziness. I used Ubuntu, then tried a few distros based on it, and Linux Mint worked well enough out of the box.

I have a few issues with it, but i have easy workarounds so that's good enough for me.

Ubuntu because it was the first distro (after Mint and PopOS) to boot on my eclectic hardware.

Artix as my daily driver because of the AUR, and I like runit. I no longer feel the need to distro hop; I'm happy here.

Bazzite. Just works really Convenient updates, and more straightforward features

I started using Linux with Arch as first distro Fedora KDE and Arch would be my other picks

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it's very up to date yet reliable, package management doesn't require me to get my head around anything complicated, automatic btrfs snapshots allow me to rollback if I mess anything up, and I like KDE Plasma and the YaST utilities.

I used a bunch of distributions (like Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, Debian etc.). Then I created a distribution-like system with LFS -BLFS and now using itbecause I want to see how Linux works in a detailed way. It's a little painful but it's not a problem if you are a masochist person who doesn't have to do anything else.

Mint here. It looks like Windows and runs the software and hardware I want. Simple as that.

For my main desktop I use Mint because it just works, widely supported and Cinnamon is good (sadly no Wayland yet. ;_;). I also use Home-manager for my configuration because it allows me to easily just specify my config as a set of files I can check into git.

For my server, I use NixOS, because having all my configuration in a few text files is very nice to get an overview of what my server is doing.

I use Devuan on my servers, changed because I was annoyed that systemd was forced on me. (I have mellowed a bit since and accept that systemd is here to stay)

I chose Mint for my laptop, because I just want a OS that works and still gives me a taskbar. (Here I got fed up when Ubuntu switched away from gnome)

All of them are apt based Linux because it just works and when apt shoots itself in the foot during dist upgrades you can still wrangle it back in working order.

Long time user of Fedora. Tried Ubuntu but came back to Fedora. But now almost migrated to Almalinux. For software app, use flatpak, which has the latest and no library dependencies. Using Wayland too on Almalinux. So not missing anything since moving to away from Fedora to Almalinux.

I started off with ubuntu in 2009, switched to mint some years later, because of the cinnamon desktop environment which I liked better than the new ubuntu unity flavour.

This year I switched to manjaro with kde plasma. Just for fun honestly.