OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Recently I bought cheap Surface-like x86 tablet on a rather recent hardware, and running Debian and its cousins required more tinkering than I was willing to do, so I decided to go with a more modern rolling release. Tried Arch for a few months, bricked it from mixing stable and testing branches, tried Fedora, and finally settled in Tumbleweed. I like it for being on the bleeding edge and exceptionally stable at the same time, perhaps thanks to robust OpenSUSE Build Service automated testing. And it is from a European company, that can't hurt.

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

Mint. Just because it works with zero issues on the desktop. Everything else is either Rocky, RH or Debian.

Mine may be the funniest

I used to always recommend people use Linux Mint as their first distro, but then it hit me, how can I recommend something I only installed for five minutes? So I got myself Linux Mint, it was 21.3 Virginia at that time, now I have more important things to do in my system and it has stayed.

I used Arch in my old laptop for 2 and half years, learned alot of things from Arch, also got to know some people in the Arch unofficial Matrix Room. But I have a new laptop and this is the story.

Fedora. I've been using it since Fedora Core 1 and was mostly RedHat before that. I don't have time to muck around with my desktop and Fedora almost always just works. I've had too many problems with Ubuntu and Suse and friends. And while I like Arch and Debian and others, I just want my desktop to be point and click. My days off tinkering on my desktop are long gone. Kids, house, work, wife, grandkids, other hobbies keep me busy. I save tinkering for my selfhosting adventures.

EndeavourOS on my laptop and Ubuntu on my home server. Still new to linux thought endeavour was a good choice to really get my feet wet with lessening the chance to screw things up too badly. Ubuntu because it looks like it just works.

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.

EndeavourOS because of the AUR

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

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

The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.

That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.

I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.

For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.

Arch: I have the most up to date computer in the whole world, I have the AUR, no one can stop me

switches to Debian

Debian: My packages are so stable, nothing can break the eternal peace of my system's packages

switches back to Arch

• SteamOS: because it came with my Steam Deck.
• LinuxMint: because it is an Ubuntu-derivative and widely used which makes finding solutions and packages easier and I like MATE.

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.

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.

EndeavourOS. It's the only one I tried that worked with my sound card out of the box strangely enough...

My main reason to use arch is the exceptionnally complete and useful arch wiki. Though many pages are useful for other distros as well. With the archlinux and package install guides, it's just a matter of time (and study!) until you know how to get around.

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

Wanted to try out wayland and fedora was recommended as the best experience for that during those years. Discovered the most polished, stable and smooth Linux experience I'd had to date. Mostly used ubuntu distros and arch before. Never looked back. Upgraded to Silverblue to try out the future of linux. Haven't changed anything since. Been about 3 years now on Silverblue.

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

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

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

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

EndeavorOS;

Gives the benefit of having latest up-to-date packages for gaming, while negating the downsides of having to configure the OS or graphics driver upon installation.

Honestly, if think EndeavorOS comes with full UI support to download stuff from AUR and Flathub, I think it would become a pretty solid OS for any casual user looking to get into Linux. (Well, unless they are religiously against Arch. Then again your casual user probably don't even know what 'Arch' is or care enough to be religious about it.)

Also yea, usually you run Ubuntu LTS or Debian Stable on servers unless your company paid for some licensing.

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.

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

Bazzite, Aurora, Proxmox and Ubuntu Server.

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

I'm used to debian, it was the first on the list of distros I downloaded to try and it worked right away, so I kept it. Overall, Pop Os is unintrusive and works, so it's perfect for me.

EndeavourOS - I jumped around distros a lot but always found myself coming back to arch. Then I found Endeavour which is just arch with the same basic setup I would always end up doing, so out of convenience I stuck with it

Ubuntu. Started in the Slackware days, tried a lot of distro's. Got used to debian commands/layouts etc. still happy to move to Centos for security focused installs. I find Ubuntu has a ton of support and general updates that fix anything I can find broken.

Ubuntu. It was reccomended to me by a few of my mor knowledgeable friends, and I haven't had any major issues with it. The operating system is doing what I need it to and I just can't find any motivation to want to change.

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 ;-)).

Because it's not Windows. So fed up with it. Used Debian. But as of late gotten annoyed with them and everything seems to lead me towards Arch. Dunno. We'll see. Just a bit scary to switch as I'm used with apt and not Pacman or whatever it's called :P Need to learn to make backup on the system in case something breaks etc

I'm mainly on Linux for over 20 years (still have one Windows Box for VR and some games, hopefully I can migrate this to Linux with the next hardware iteration). I was on Suse, Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Ubuntu, QubesOS (which does not self-identify as Linux-distribution) with Fedora+Debian Qubes. I never had those installed on my main machine, but also worked a lot with kali, grml, knoppix, dsl, centos, Redhat and certainly a bunch of others.

The absolute best for me, as working in it security and with different customers, is QubesOS. Sadly my current laptop is so badly supported by QubesOS that it burns 6h battery in 25 minutes and sleep/suspent does not work at all, so I'm currently on Ubuntu (which I hate for their move to snap and being Ubuntu in general)

Arch on the Desktop, Debian on the servers for peace oft mind.

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...

I use PopOS on my desktop. I was looking to upgrade an old Chromebook and while researching my options came dangerously close to buying a MacBook Air. Decided to buy an android tablet instead for my portable computer and bought another SSD so I could dual-boot on my desktop.

It's clean, somewhat macOS like in appearance but I actually have freedom to do what I want. Just in time for Windows 10 sunsetting too.

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 use Debian on machines I don't want to fuck with or have change much.

I use Endeavour because it was recommended to me for the bleeding edge hardware I had just bought for gaming.

Alpine!

More stable then arch, but just as if not more lightweight and customizable. I have nothing against systemD or GNU but for my usecase I just want something small and simple

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.