Nix because I have a bad memory and hate doing things more than once

Elementary OS.

I really like the focus on delivering a solid, intuitive and snappy desktop environment. It is absolutely what I recommend to newbies, who are looking for a Windows or macOS replacement.

Fedora KDE, because my preferred distro Mint Cinnamon doesn't at the moment have good support for things like FreeSync.

Dietpi. Because I'm forced to.

Ubuntu, because I'm fine with something that "just works"

Arch with KDE on ThinkPad T460s (studying and bullshit pc).

Nobara with i3wm on home studio/gaming desktop. Switching to Arch on it one day but CBA at the moment.

Honestly which distro I use isn't all that important to me these days so long as I'm getting decently new kernel updates. Depending on my use case that's not even important. Used Debian LTS on a home media center for probably 8 years.

Arch, cause I set it up to my liking once out of curiosity when I was procrastinating, wrote a script that automates https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance and now am too lazy to switch to something else.
Especially since maintenance involves typing Update.sh once a week or so, and nothing else.

I use TuxedoOS. I wanted something that kept up with the latest KDE updates which ran a cleaned up version of Ubuntu... that's TuxedoOS to a T. I had looked at other options like Kubuntu or just installing KDE over something like PopOS, but TuxedoOS was the most stable and up to date of those options in my testing.

That said, I have run into innumerable problems on it due to apt repos that it doesn't include which come standard on Ubuntu.

NixOS because all the other ones differ about as much as Windows 10 from Windows 11. Guix doesn't count.

Alpine Linux. It's pretty lightweight (uses ~250MiB on idle with sway), is easy to install and is super stable. My only criticism is that there is quite a lot of software not available in the repos, but this is mainly fixed by flatpaks.

Arch on my desktop and laptop, Debian stable goes on everything else.

Kubuntu on my desktop, I prefer KDE as a DE and I'm used to the Debian ecosystem.

Linux Mint on my relatively low powered laptop that I rarely use.

Debian stable on my media server.

Tuxedo OS. Same idea as smth like mint or PopOs but (imo) done much better. It also has rolling release for some stuff (like the DE) and non-rolling for other stuff (not even sure what bc I don't really look in detail). It also uses KDE plasma my favorite (and imo the best) DE. It's got pretty good app availability in terms of official packages because it is based on Ubuntu LTS (now 24.04). There are a couple things that are vestigial on most computers bc it was made for tuxedo computers but these have no negative effect on other devices in my experience.

Lubuntu

My first foray into unix-likes was oprnbsd with fluxbox. I eventually moved to openbox. Lubuntu with lxqt gives a nice simple openbox experience with a menu and stuff. I customize it to have openbox present the mouse menu instead of the whole pcmanfm desktop thing.

Gentoo on my home computer. Started way back in the day when you had to recompile source RPMs on RPM-based distros to get CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support. Debian language support was excellent, but I didn't enjoy always being 5 package versions behind, especially as fast as some software was being developed.

CJK isn't an issue anywhere anymore, but I stay on Gentoo because it has all the packages I want, and it doesn't force systemd on me.

Will be moving away from Ubuntu on my work computer because of all the foolishness with 'is it deb or is it snap?'. Not sure what I'll go to.