Kubuntu. The support and stability of Ubuntu but with KDE Plasma 5 (not a huge fan of gnome), and probably one of the more straightforward distros to use in my experience alongside Linux Mint or Pop!_OS

Short answer: Custom Fedora Silverblue image through uBlue's template, because it offers a relatively mature and easy to use distro with unique features in terms of stability and security that's (almost) unmatched within the Linux space.

Long answer:

Servers I run Debian, I do not want flashy I just want stable and tested security fixes.

I could not hack being that far behind for my desktop OS however (which I run on three different devices), so I run Ubuntu, which I remove as much Ubuntu and Gnome baggage as possible such as snaps and by running Sway.

I should really swap to a different distro that also has Debian as its root but without the stuff I don't want and Sway by default. However I also want stuff to be simple and up to date, as I make my money on my desktop PCs, I cannot afford for it to be a PITA every time I try to install patches.

I do have one PC running arch, but its mostly for the memes (and for PIKVM)

I did used to be Red Hat through and through. I started with Linux back in 98 using Red Hat CD ROMs, but I left for Debian over some previous controversy that I do not remember now, years before the Centos stuff.

Ubuntu because it requires the least amount of hack fixes to get working.

And snap has vastly simplified software installation.

I have Arch (KDE) installed on my desktop at home. I have been using it for 6 years and I love it, especially the AUR! This month I have been mostly using my laptop and I am using MX Linux 23 KDE which is great! I really find it's tools very useful when I need them (which is not often, but I am glad they are there).

This has been beaten to the ground.

Void Linux

The name is really cool

Debain on servers because it just works.
Arch on desktops because you got basically every software package you'd ever need in the AUR and it's somewhat stable.

Have been having great luck with the move to Linux, Garuda on my main desktop pc and fedora bazzite on my laptop.

While we are starting fights with our opinions, I absolutely love KDE plasma.

Moving to Linux has made me so happy. I feel like a computer owner / user again. It's not always perfect but nothing has stopped me dead in the water and my issues have resolved in a few minutes of tinkering.

Nobara bc my first year of using Linux had some rough patches, and I just wanna turn my brain off and game for a while with minimal troubleshooting.

I'll start distro hopping again soon tho

OpenSuse Slowroll (rolling release with constant updates plus an update burst every two months)

• Prefer rolling release over fixed release.
• I do like OpenSuse in general.
• I install a lot of packages and want to stay up to date (security & GUI notifications). With OpenSuse Tumbleweed I have to install a couple gigabytes of updates every week. It's not ideal for me.
• Too impatient to wait for the proper release of Slowroll.

I scrolled this far and no slackware?

Arch because I'm too lazy for a non-rolling distro. I should really set up snapshots and my dotfiles repo on my new laptop though (:

openSUSE Tumbleweed or MicroOS. I've since long given up on so called "stable release" distros, because a boon to me is to feel like I'm not using software from the stone age, which is what I feel every time I have to use a RHEL, SLE or Ubuntu system.

I've used Tumbleweed on laptop and desktop for about 6 years. Never has anything crashed, or at least nothing has ever become unbootable. The most damage ever done by an update was a regression in mesa that made 3d accelerated content absurdly slow, but even that was fixed within a few days.

I use MicroOS on almost all my servers and it's rock solid.

zypper is slower than pacman, apt and dnf, but it's extremely usable and easy to work with, even in enterprise scenarios. I'd say it's basically on par with dnf, usability wise.

openSUSE in general feels extremely stable, and I just love that they went btrfs by default a few years back and just seem to have this future proofing aspect.

I'm a Linux noob so I don't have a distro preference yet but I'm currently using Fedora KDE spin. It's pretty nice.

Use whatever distro you feel comfortable with. That being said, there are definitely good ones and bad ones. I use Arch btw. That's the beauty of Linux tho. You can try a distro and if you dont like it you can literally install a new distro over the old one by blowing away everything but the /home partition. Did I mention yet I use Arch? I use Arch btw. The package managers are such a great tool to get a system up and running in a short time, but you can always compile everything from scratch if you want. You can config your programs with the default settings and let the OS do it for you, or you can micromanage every single config option and take a little more time to personalize your machine. I've told you I use Arch? I use Arch btw.

Yeah, Linux is great! And in case you were wondering I use a distro called Arch Linux.

Arch. It has pretty great documentation and I like having the safety of knowing what's on my computer. Other than those two things, I just like arch I guess. There isn't anything wrong with other distros.

Manjaro, because it's rolling release and it's built on Arch, only the necessary stuff is installed (including a desktop environment), you can set it up with just a few clicks, and it works out of the box, and even proprietary GPU drivers are easily installable with mhwd. Stable and reliable.

In case anything breaks, there's quick help on their forum, which (when it happened to me once) outperformed customer support of proprietary software.

It's been my daily driver for almost 8 years without any major issue.

So in short, robustness, rolling release, simplicity, community.

Edit: I have to add, my use case is for a desktop PC for software design/development + a little gaming.

I keep trying other distros, and then coming back to Debian unstable XFCE. Linux Mint Debian Edition is ok. At work I did lots of Enterprise Redhat, but I'm glad I don't have to use it after I retired.

I started with LinuxFT from a magazine coverdisk. I also installed it on an old 486 at the office. It became the "internet box". The company director at the time believed Bill Gates that the internet would be a fad and wasn't worth investing in and would not put any money into the company internet connection. So, it was an old 486, running LinuxFT, with a modem calling out on demand, squid proxy, email boxes etc. But it worked.

After that I moved to Redhat (before it was paid for). I remember for sure installing RH5. It was definitely a smoother experience.

Server wise, I went through various distros. Once I got to debian, for servers I never really left the "apt" world. Management wise, it's just too easy to work with. Hopping between Ubuntu and Debian even now.

For firewalls I've been through ipfwadm (Kernel 2.0.x), ipchains (Kernel 2.2.x) and iptables (Kernel 2.4.x). Now, there is some newer stuff now. Nftables, but there hasn't been a "you must change" situation like the other two and as such, I've generally stuck with iptables, mainly because when I did try nftables I had a real problem getting it to play nice with qos. Probably all fixed now, but I'm too lazy to change.

Desktop wise. I dual boot windows/linux. Linux is Manjaro, and I like Manjaro, for the fact that gaming generally just worked. However, I feel like every major upgrade I am chasing broken dependencies for far too long. But, when it works, Manjaro is great. However, I have had several failed desktop experiments. I ran Gentoo way way way back, I think I had an AMD Athlon at the time. I thought it was great, I mean building stuff for my specific setup, nice idea and all. But upgrades were so damn slow compiling everything! I tried Ubuntu, but I never found the desktop to be any good. I did also have Redhat way back in the late 90s. But the desktop was just poor back then.

I still have yet to see someone mention Hanna Montana Linux.

Fine, let's have it your way.

🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 , obviously 😀 It's flexible to no end, enables trimming off the most cruft and, because of that, can be the most secure. That last bit depends on how trigger happy you are to installing packages from outside 🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 repos.

Would highly recommend giving 🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 a try ;)

NixOS. There are lots of great things about it (like atomic upgrades, easy rollbacks, no dependency hell, safely mixing stable and unstable packages, and more) but it's killer feature is that (almost) everything about the system is specified in a single config file

Fedora Kinoite because it doesnt suck and doesnt break. Actually switched to ublue kinoite main, very close to upstream with minimal changes that always stay the same (its always the same difference, not weirdly diverging more and more from upstream).

But I dont know if it is the best model, as Fedoras BTRFS snapshots + ostree without the image based thing would sound better ? But this is not existing.

Btw Nix, Flatpak, Distrobox/Toolbox, Distrobox/Toolbox with root, Podman, Docker, layering, removal, are all things that work on Fedora Atomic. Maybe even snap if someone is brave enough to try

EndeavourOS. I like having a relatively bloat-free setup. It's also been nice because it's been easy to manage so far.

Fedora Silverblue! 😊

Immutable Linux is the future (and any container-based filesystem )

I like Void because it makes me quirky.

Just kidding.

I like Void because it makes me quirky, doesn't require me to learn how systemD works, AND it is lightweight! Plus it has literally never broken on me.

I just distro hopped to nixos. I was unaware of it until I came to the fediverse. The declarative system, once you get over the small learning curve, I feel is very easy to understand and configure. Creating and being able to roll back system configurations is a great feature too.

Previously I was using void. I quite enjoy it too and am sure I'll revisit it. It's a light (no systemd) rolling release distro with an emphasis on stable packages.

Debian for me and Linux Mint Debian Edition for anyone I help with computers, because I don't want to configure a system more than once and to investigate why some stuff doesn't work.

Gentoo because it's what I know, and I know enough to make it do what I want.

Linux Mint Debian Edition for reliability with some user-friendly additions, dual boot with Garuda’s gaming edition because it pretty much sets up everything on its own for that purpose and has the latest updates.

Arch because the packages are recent. Arch has no shiny innovation and even the performance is not that fast, but I always find a way to make everything working. It is the only distro like that for me.