NixOS for me. It's a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there's also an entire distro based on it.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It's very up to date, yet it's somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven't had any problems finding software, yet it's not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.

Opensuse TW

I've been using Opensuse since it was called SuSE. Tumbleweed is great.

Can it still be a favourite if I haven't touched it in a decade? I still love Gentoo but I have enough shiny things to burn up my time.

OpenSUSe. Tumbleweed as a rolling bistro is amazingly stable, yast is nice, and it all just works great. Leap for the servers, and things are solid.

I'm enjoying what Nix does. That said, the learning curve is very steep, and the documentation is very inconsistent and usually poor.

The repositories for both nixpkgs and nixos are absolutely colossal, which is a huge plus, but their configurations are not listed on the same page, and it can lead to a lot of confusion. Unlike Arch's PKGBUILD, which practically tell the build system exactly what to do, you'll have to learn the structure of current configuration files, or the more recent flake system, to setup things how you like.

Damn Small Linux was a favorite a long time ago.

PopOS! Is it for me these days.

I've started to dip my toes into NixOS. I really love their design concepts.

OpenSuse tumbleweed

Alpine.

I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.

So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.

I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!

Gentoo. It's amazingly customisable, easy to configure and write packages for, has an extraordinarily good wiki (and installation instructions), and is always seeing new and active development.

There is also official binary package support for architectures as of recently too, which makes it easy to mix and match compiling from source and binary packages.

Another vote for openSUSE Tumbleweed

I discovered this on Lemmy, clearly there is no going back

https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/

I’m trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a few personal servers as I wait for Slowroll, I want to get back to trying to get Gentoo running, and I should check out Guix as a server in a VM.

Gentoo having a binary option should help since I seem to mess up the kernel part of the installation.

If we allow derivatives, I'd say SteamOS despite being Arch. It's putting Linux in non-technical people's literal hands and it's not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It's almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I've seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.

Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It's been a really long time since we've last seen a fundamentally different distro that's got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they're still very package oriented. We've been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It's incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they're atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.

I'm enjoying OpenSuse Tumbleweed loving rolling release and stability

PopOS. Mostly because I’m really interested in their Rust based DE that’s to replace Gnome.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed without a doubt!

DietPi! It's one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It's ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn't have what you're looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.

Custom North Korean linux. Preinstalled missile tracking software.

Can't believe no-one mentioned voidlinux yet. It's very tasty.

NixOS is not based on any other distro because it has its own package manager which is better than all the other distros'

Bazzite. It's based on Fedora uBlue so it's technically Fedora, but being an immutable OS, it works quite differently enough that it counts as its own distro. For instance, you don't use dnf or yum to install stuff, you'd use Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix. Updates are done using the rpm-ostree command, and it's effectively a rolling release model, but atomic in nature so you get none of the instability that you'd get in a typical rolling release.

Nix

QubesOS. When you need security and don't need to play games, this is objectively the best distro.

Guix

OpenSUSE Leap, has been a solid 7 year run, with flawless updates. And no graphics issues because nVidia hosts their own repo for the gpu drivers.

I really enjoyed Solus Linux but the last I checked, it didn't support something I need for my job. So, I do use Arch, but was completely smitten and impressed with their impressive boot speed. From pushing POST screen to desktop, it was something like 5 seconds. With Arch, after POST, maybe 10-15 seconds.

With their recent drama, it's been a bit hard to see them struggle. They just did release a fresh build I read online, so they are still alive. :)

https://getsol.us/

Some of my favourites are Void Linux, Artix and Opensuse Tumbleweed

Void was my first non-systemd distro, and it was super snappy as well. Some packages may not available but overall I had a really great experience with it. It also offers a version with the musl C library. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Opensuse tumbleweed is an overall a great distro, it's one of my favourites. Also I noticed that many people have recommended it and that's for a good reason. It's installer isn't that user friendly but I would prefer it over Fedora's installer any day. ( I haven't tried the last 3 iterations of Fedora, so it might have changed now )

Artix is well... arch with different init systems. Nothing too crazy. Its what I have been daily driving for the past year or so.

Alpine

Loving Alpine

OpenSUSE, it's what I'd be using if Fedora didn't exist.

Gentoo!

Gentoo for the documentation, but for a modern comp with bad bootloader implementation, Fedora's anaconda system for the secure boot shim is irreplaceable and my daily. I won't consider any distro without a shim and clear guide for UEFI secure boot keys. In that vain, Gentoo is the only doc source I know of that walks the user through booting into UEFI directly with Keytool.

I get that there are a lot of novel are cool distros out there, but I just stick with Debian (or one of the other well known distros that have been around for decades).

I do it because from a security standpoint, they have my trust. Maybe in 10-20 years with a good reputation and history, but it's not there.

I really enjoy ZorinOS! I've been using ZorinOS 16.3 and am awaiting the upgrade to 17 through their tool. It's been great for a PC that has an Nvidia GTX1060 that I have hooked up to my TV as a twitch/YouTube/Netflix box. I chose Zorin because they claimed to get the Nvidia drivers installed correctly "out of the box", and they delivered!