I use Gentoo for my daily driver, and Debian for servers.

So I use Arch for my personal work. I never had a problem with stability. I've also started to be interested in NixOS, but I'm gonna just use it as an Server OS, I feel like it makes sense with the infrastructure as code implications.

I semi-regularly distro-hop, but Xubuntu is the distro I keep coming back to between hops to take a break or when one goes (temporarily) dormant. It's currently running on my primary server/linux machine.

Reasons: 1.) It's light on resources 2.) It's very simple and clean. 3.) It works with all the programs I use regularly; only one needs to be hand-compiled (but that one has to be compiled for literally any Linux machine). 4.) I know it. Scrub/partition/install/configure in under an hour. I can pick up any of my projects again immediately where I left off.

Daily drive Gnentoo, not sure if I could ever wholeheartedly recommend it since it's not really accessible for beginners...

If I need a VM I'd probably spin up an Arch or Alpine since they are relatively minimal & are not that difficult to set up once you're familiar with stuff (well Arch is one-command setup now). For servers... pretty much Debian always since that's what everyone supports

Stability-wise... I guess it depends on what type of "stability" I want? If I meant stability by having stable programming environments then it's not compatible with having new updates, Debian probably would be best for that. If I meant stability by the system not breaking too often, then most rolling release distros are probably fine? Arch/Gentoo have a lot more room for user error which is probably where most of the instability comes from, but otherwise they typically don't have too many issues I believe. Fedora is great but there's been some issue with RHEL going close-source, so I guess some ppl won't want to support that endeavor

Arch Linux. Because... it's rock n' rolling!

I love Kubuntu. Plasma reminds me of windows 10 layout which I prefer over the windows 11/ Mac drawer layout.

mint for my laptop running awesomewm and lightened it up a bit - To have a no-thrills always works never complaints machine.

fedora server edition plus awesomewm for my desktop

Anything Arch, because it's hard, it's a pain in the ass and as an intermediate user I need Arch to break on me so I can fix it and learn.

btw arch Linux

Fedora, although I dislike SELinux and I think they should have a less strict policy with regards to FLOSS. Like, I prefer FLOSS over proprietary software, but I just wish they'd be a bit more pragmatic and allow both on the default repos and just leave it up to the user to decide what to use and what not. I guess that would also prevent dilemmas like the recent hardware acceleration drama?

Otherwise I like their balance between stability and being up to date, fast update cycle and the large amount of available packages.

Manjaro - because everyone else seems to only be voting for Arch itself here. Manjaro is actually very stable, but I did sometimes have some trouble with AUR updates clashing. I like it because it stays relatively up to date and I don't have to do any major reinstalls or upgrades. I've been on it for a few years and never have lost data or was not able to get it started (even if it did need a manual kick-start once or twice). Like any distro, over time you become savvy around what to use and what to avoid.

I use manjaro, if you like the up-to-dateness of arch, with the polish and ease of setup of popos, it may be a great candidate for you.

This is what I drive too, at work we have RHEL though, and we're required to use RHEL base images for our containers. UBI-minimal is small enough though