Recently switched to Arch, the archinstall script is amazing and gets you all set up. much better onboarding nowadays and is great to use.

Most answers seem to be Debian. Sort of just works for me as well. With KDE Plasma and couldn't be happier with it. I keep on forgetting how I did stuff though because it's solid set and forget most of the time.

my first install of debian was before it had names. my most recent was last tuesday. i've strayed for short stints, but debian is where it's at. i do have a couple 'others' but they are special setups for specific things.

if you like the deb-based system but want to get away from canonical, trixie is ready to rescue you.

Arch, diving slowly in NixOS

I use LinuxMint and have been since 2018 or so. I have been using since 2007. Though the first time I tried using it was in 2003 but it didn't go well for me at the time.

Never was a distro hopper. Used ubuntu for 10 years. It's not great, but it's good enough. 2 years ago, I made a jump (for me) and loaded up Fedora. As a daily driver, I absolutely love it. That said, I also just recently partitioned a Debian boot, just because there are some few things it does better with no flash or sparkle.

Started on 1993 with Yggdrasil Plug and Play Linux. Before kernel 1.0! Before ELF binaries, even.

I've been running Ubuntu Studio for almost ten years. Before that it was Redhat variants. Before Linux, a short time with 386/BSD. But for work, SunOS, Irix, HP-UX, and a stint on a team supporting a VAX 8900 running VMS

I'm about to dump Ubuntu Studio. Thinking either Fedora or Debian.

After some years of distrohopping I had a long time on Ubuntu/Debian, but for partly similar reasons I wanted to change. Fedora, I love it. Smooth nice, out of the way, very fine if you want it to stay out if your way.

Could also drop freebsd in here. Surprisingly easy to install as a desktop with something like xfce, you get zfs on root very easily. Though, there probably will be some applications missing.

Anyway, good luck on your next linux adventure 😀

On my new laptop, I wanted to try something less "Cannonical"-y too, after many years of using Ubuntu. I already used Manjaro KDE on my desktop and I kinda liked it. So that, I decided to install Arch and maybe copy some configs from Manjaro, if needed. Well, at first glance, it was awesome. Fast, fully configurable system, that is fully mine. Alas, that euphoria didn't last long: very soon some fundamental problems occured. Here I should specify that I'm using my laptop for live musical performance. And I focus on some specific things that other users might not need to.

1. Wine - couldn't make it work with 32bit apps and VST plugins. That's really important to me, because some of those don't have any native replacements. Whatever I tried, Wine just refused to create a 32bit prefix.
2. At some point, several (lots of) important LV2 plugins stopped showing their GUIs. They kept working in "generic GUI" mode, but for things like equalizers having a good visualization is crucial.
3. KDE+pipewire+wayland is the worst setup for live performance ever. When you move your mouse around taskbar, it creates video-streams (to draw thumbnails) that make audio graph massively crackle.
4. Really bad performance with several soundcards. SOme cards just refused to work together in one graph, turning the sound into the ocean of xruns. And that possibility of several soundcards was the reason why wanted to switch from JACK to pipewire in the first place.
5. No possibility to have pipewire-jack and pipewire-jack-client packages installed simultaneously.
6. LADISH and Claudia - they're quite tricky obsolete pieces of software that I use. These are really handy for making large complicated audio systems. Alternatively I tried raysession, but it didn't work well too (didn't restore connections).

This list could have been longer, but I will probably stop here. After a month of struggling I switched back to Ubuntu Mate 24.04. And what can I say... It works fine. It's a bit tougher than Arch, but not much; and at the end - not a single issue of listed above. And Ubuntu has custom lowlatency kernel that helps with realtime audio applications. And it's still Linux after all - I can easily do whatever I want - like, uninstall Snap. Some packages are too old - that's acceptable for an LTS release; if I need something up-to-date, I can just build it from source. Also I notice the same issues on my Manjaro desktop, but it's not so crucial there, as I primarily use desktop for gaming and video montage. But still, considering to return to Ubuntu on it too.

What I want to say is that maybe Ubuntu is not so bad, really. Cutting off some unneeded things can turn it into a good OS.

I always use Debian for my servers simply because it's stable and third-party repositories are abundant. As for desktops/laptops, I prefer Fedora — I trust their privacy policy and packages rarely break.

Using Arch for almost a decade now. Started with Ubuntu, fedora, mint but finally landed on arch. But am thinking about switching to gentoo; arch has gone too mainstream that im afraid it might be plagued with "age verification" virus

debian on my server. it's rock solid. I run a LOT of shit on it, and it rarely cracks about 4-5 GB RAM out of 32GB.

Arch since years. Never had issues

Gentoo and Fedora for workstations although I’m thinking of switching my last Fedora machine to gentoo. Debian for servers but I’m wanting to learn alpine as well.

LMDE on desktop. MX Linux on laptop. Nextcloud server runs Ubuntu. Homelab server on Debian.

I used a lot over the last 25 years of Linux, started with Debian, Suse Linux, then some years with Gentoo (i learned so much in that time, I can recommend it), and now I am using Arch.

Arch gives me lots of the freedoms and possibilites that I am used to from Gentoo but without the constant pain of compilation. I have Arch on my Desktop, all my servers, my NAS

Now using CachyOS, I recommend Bazzite to newcomers.

Question to users and distro hoppers. I've grown to love Mint used it for years. But sometimes it updates and moves my game folders, loses my saves and I have to hunt in my system and hope I find my precious years long game saves.

Is there such thing as a distro that never changes the structure where truly all my files, system files, games will all be the same over years?

I've tried NIX and liked it, I've tried LMDE and Stock Mint with Ubuntu bugs yay, I've tried base Debian 13, and lastly Fedora kinoite..

Whats a system that updates but doesn't lose my shit when I just want to game and use my PC? I like having all my files never move, structure of system never change, but having the ability to run steam and heroic games of all types. I'm still back to Stock Mint Ubuntu but dammit if they don't introduce bugs sometimes. Like suspend / resume audio doesn't work after sleeping my desktop and back on without restarting.

Ubuntu was my entry back in 2012. Started using Ubuntu family seriously 10 ya. Then sparky Linux (Debian based) then manjaro for a long time. Jumped into Archlinux in c 2019 and have been having chilling exp with arch+KDE. Linux mint (Debian) was among the best, but settled in arch. Tried others in the process and did not work - fedora, open SUSE, elementary, solus. I m sure they are pretty good, but I see no point in learning them for no extra benefit.

Only now, with age classification shit in systemd, I feel motivated to try other distro. But it is a hassle.

Depends! Bazzite on ROG Ally X, Debian for servers, CachyOS for my desktop and laptop and Fedora for my sons PC

Have been using Linux since Slackware in the early 90s, both for work and at home - been through a lot of distros since then.

Currently use Debian on my servers and VMs, and CachyOS (with KDE Plasma) on my main desktop. I like the bleeding edge of Arch for my desktop, and find CachyOS to be a very sensible plug and play way to get into Arch (I tried to run Arch before, and also EndeavourOS, although that was a while back and not the smoothest experience for me - things might be more mature now, but CachyOS was the one that finally reached the point for me that allowed a full switch from Windows on the desktop to Linux)

Most of my servers run virtualized on Proxmox, which itself is Debian based though. I also run pfSense as my firewall/router which is FreeBSD based.

Debian for work and my home machines that I don't need to be the latest and greatest (nas, media centee).

Arch on personal, éess implrtant machines

Secureblue

Started on Ubuntu as anybody, then PopOS, and then Garuda, but then I realized that the Garuda community is a completely POS so I ditched the whole distro. And now I'm using vanilla Arch with my own settings.

Between those hopps can be like an average of 3 distrohopps per day, because 'this distro is better because have this and that', but when you start using WM and need to configure each config file with an different programming language and all that, you really stop caring about if that distro have blur or not.

You're going to be super disappointed to learn that most people who have been using Linux as daily driver for decades just use whatever works. Linus himself just uses Fedora.

Nobody that has real shit to do wants to worry about things not working or causing issues. Immutable is pointless, Nix is something I use for work, Ubuntu is dead to me...etc.

Linux over 15 years

currently Fedora KDE and it's fine

RHEL on servers, then either Debian LTS or Fedora on desktop. Been interested in Zorin OS but haven’t gotten around to trying it yet. Curious if their Windows application integration is as seamless as they claim.

It really depends what you want out of your computer, how much you like to tinker, and how comfortable you are getting your hands dirty. I got back onto a daily driver Linux desktop a little under two years ago, but I've been running Linux on servers since um..mid 90s? I've had Linux desktops mostly on secondary computers, but didn't go back fully until more recently.

I don't run Arch, but I feel like that community is probably closest to the feeling Linux had back in the day--when we recompiled the kernel with the specific drivers we needed for everything to save memory, I knew every process running, every program I installed. I compiled most of my own programs from source. Or maybe Gentoo is the current version of that. If that's your jam, go that route.

For a while in the early aughts I ran a ton of servers with RedHat and developed an aversion to rpm and its mess of dependencies. Debian felt so much more stable and I've been picking Debian for servers ever since. If you want boring and stable, you can't go wrong with Debian. I have many times just set up Debian with automatic update and reboot, and those things just keep going for years. I can't remember when a Debian update broke my system, which I definitively can't say for every OS.

Then, I started wanting to game on Linux. The flip side of boring and stable is outdated. So when I planned my new Linux desktop build I went distro shopping a bit. I tried out a few live distros at first. I knew I wanted up-to-date drivers (for new hardware), but not a lot of tinkering, because I got a lot older and less patient at this point.

I ended up on Fedora this time. My choice was driven by the balance of being up to date enough for my (simple) gaming needs, yet mainstream enough (read: boring) that if anything broke, there would be forums available and I could get back to just enjoying my computer. I prefer KDE Plasma over Gnome, so that's what I ended up with.

I'm happy with it and not planning to change. But I do get that sinking feeling of not really knowing what my computer is doing, because, just like on Windows, there are a hundred processes running in the background and I don't know what half of them do. It's just that at this point I'm not curious enough anymore to go digging into the man pages and the wikis and peruse the source code to find out. I just want it to work and let me get to my doom scrolling.

So for mainstream and boring, I recommend Debian or Fedora, maybe one of the Arch derivatives like CachyOS. If you want to customize and tinker, probably plain Arch or one of the smaller distros that are well documented and less opinionated. I didn't mention Mint, because I think it's a bit too simplified for someone with some Linux experience. I would install it for my parents, though.

rotate every few weeks months

I m stuck with Lubuntu for more than 10 years now, they do the job for me and I m good,

what I will always love about them is that I can customise them to be exactly how they functioned and looked the first time I used them and that's all I want from an OS, I don't want extremely drastic changes on my OS I don't get impressed much by that, but low usage of resources is enough, my mentality with computers is if it's not broken no reason to fix it

Selfhosted server for +10 years. Debian. Desktop was on windows. I switched 2 or 3 years ago. It's fedora KDE for me.

My custom Kinoite-based system using ublue-builder. Gets me updates with 0 interference with my daily use, secure boot, tpm based FDE, and I can still install packages during the CI step (although distrobox is the main way to do that).

I've been on Linux since my childhood (found it in a tech magazine in 2008), hopped through Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro until like 2022 when I settled on Fedora KDE, then shifted to their immutable stuff 1-2 years later.

I'm at 9 years myself, I use Ubuntu on desktop, Mint on my home ThinkPad, Ubuntu on my work ThinkPad, and a mix of Debian/Proxmox and Ubuntu for my servers. I'm hoping to switch my desktop to Mint at some point.

Used Arch for 10 years. Been trying CachyOS for the past year. Considering Artix if systemd continues down the age verification slippery slope. Haven't tried it but NixOS looks interesting.

i've been using cachyos for three years and have no desire to switch my distro to anything else. before cachy, i used to use ubuntu, mint and mx for over ten years.

Mint on my main daily driver because I need the stability for work, and don't need bleeding edge for common work stuff. MX Linux KDE on my Thinkpad because KDE plays extremely well with external screens, and I need to plug it in to a lot of different foreign monitors/projectors during a normal work week.