I use Fedora. I like the combination of recent, stable, up-to-date software, new releases every six months, and firmware updates for my ThinkPad direct from Lenovo.
Workstation:
Used to love gentoo, but it kept breaking on me.
Went Ubuntu until they went stupid, then arch for a while but again, breakage.
Debian works, I have to spend 0 energy on it, and I can layer on different vms and lxc for whatever other distros I want.
Server:
Was freebsd because it was perfect and jails were next level shit but people keep putting out software that was obnoxious to install without docker, so debian as hypervisor/zfs and freebsd for most apps, debian for the obnoxious ones. Perfect system.
I use Fedora 38, it's stable, things just work, and the software is up-to-date.
I use Arch. I use the command-line to update, I am very glad that I can do the updates when I do want them. Of course, going over the update list is my responsibility, but such is the power my OS grants me—I can make or break things.
Otherwise, yeah, it's the customization it offers me. I can make it as janky as I want it to be, or rice it to my heart's content.
So many nice things about Arch. I got into Linux with Ubuntu, switched to Debian for many years, and now use Arch.
Why Arch?
I installed all my Arch installations with the Calam Arch installer ISO. The one big complaint I see with Arch is the complicated install process, but with Calam installer it's no different than most other distros.
While I know it's not the best distro, I don't care to re-image, I left that life behind with Windows.
Manjaro-
I love the fact that I can have "Stable" and "Unstable" kernels installed simultaneously. It's a nice handy way to recover or narrow down if an issue is related to the kernel. They've done an excellent job with the default Grub settings to allow this as well as side-by-siding with Windows if I want (which made transitioning from Windows to Linux easier).
Relatively fast updates, AUR, PKGBUILD, Downgrade, the Wiki, the community, not controlled by some corporate entity, no telemetry, and last but not least the logo ;)
Arch Linux because it has sane defaults, is rolling, up to date, helpful community, awesome wiki and is minimalistic.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0