Fedora. I've been using it since Fedora Core 1 and was mostly RedHat before that. I don't have time to muck around with my desktop and Fedora almost always just works. I've had too many problems with Ubuntu and Suse and friends. And while I like Arch and Debian and others, I just want my desktop to be point and click. My days off tinkering on my desktop are long gone. Kids, house, work, wife, grandkids, other hobbies keep me busy. I save tinkering for my selfhosting adventures.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Recently I bought cheap Surface-like x86 tablet on a rather recent hardware, and running Debian and its cousins required more tinkering than I was willing to do, so I decided to go with a more modern rolling release. Tried Arch for a few months, bricked it from mixing stable and testing branches, tried Fedora, and finally settled in Tumbleweed. I like it for being on the bleeding edge and exceptionally stable at the same time, perhaps thanks to robust OpenSUSE Build Service automated testing. And it is from a European company, that can't hurt.

I use popos because I own a system 76 and it's what I'm used to.

I use Mint. I had a phase with different distros, but when I had my son, and he turned 3, I installed Linux Mint for him. Little by little, I started using it myself. Today my son is in the military service and I still use Mint.

EndeavourOS. It's the only one I tried that worked with my sound card out of the box strangely enough...

Ubuntu LTS because I don't have to fight with it

Mint. Just because it works with zero issues on the desktop. Everything else is either Rocky, RH or Debian.

EndeavourOS on my laptop and Ubuntu on my home server. Still new to linux thought endeavour was a good choice to really get my feet wet with lessening the chance to screw things up too badly. Ubuntu because it looks like it just works.

I used the big ones, ubuntu, arch, opensuse and (atomic) fedora. Fedora had the nicest out of box experience. Morover, I moved to podman, systemd, selinux, etc. And the atomic version showed me a new workflow with flatpak and distrobox (nowadays, I use nix oftentimes).

The best part about it is that I do not care about the system anymore. I do not even interact with it. I don't install packages (besides the base layer and minimal modifications that are long lasting like installing openssl for GNOME iirc)

I use mainly flatpaks, if I need aur, I fire up distrobox, or use nix if I want to. And the best part is, I'd have the exact same workflow even without the atomic version. Even on another distro. I do not interact with it much.

Moreover, I am happy with all the choices fedora made with the base package and images. I do not have to do an informed choice like on arch. It just updates whenever I boot my pc. I do not need to read updates, they are just there, somewhere. I do not need to disable snaps or work around weird choices. I just start firefox, vscodium, a terminal and do whatever I want to do.

Edit: I actually wanted to switch back to opensuse just to support it but I guess I'd rather move to nix some day. Maybe with niri and cosmic.

My main reason to use arch is the exceptionnally complete and useful arch wiki. Though many pages are useful for other distros as well. With the archlinux and package install guides, it's just a matter of time (and study!) until you know how to get around.

Fedora Silverblue because I seem to break any system I have eventually, and this one’s still going.

Mint: consistency, versatility, having all the Ubuntu's benefits (being industry standard, somewhat) without the drawbacks (Canonical's opinionated bullshit like snap)

Debian: stability, predictability, leanness

Gentoo: customizability down to compile-time level

• SteamOS: because it came with my Steam Deck.
• LinuxMint: because it is an Ubuntu-derivative and widely used which makes finding solutions and packages easier and I like MATE.

Debian, on servers and a desktop. I spent a long time using Ubuntu so I'm used to APT and Debian is suitably lightweight for my not amazing hardware. I also like the non rolling nature of it.

Debian because it's what I picked when I started, and switching sounds annoying

Gentoo for my workstation because I need flexibility, security and stability there and Debian stable for my Raspberries running all the services I need 24/7 access to.

I don't like all the spin-offs of the major distros. And no, Ubuntu is not a major distro it is based on Debian and they are known for some really bad decisions in past and present, eg: snap instead of flatpak.

Ubuntu. It was reccomended to me by a few of my mor knowledgeable friends, and I haven't had any major issues with it. The operating system is doing what I need it to and I just can't find any motivation to want to change.

Because it's not Windows. So fed up with it. Used Debian. But as of late gotten annoyed with them and everything seems to lead me towards Arch. Dunno. We'll see. Just a bit scary to switch as I'm used with apt and not Pacman or whatever it's called :P Need to learn to make backup on the system in case something breaks etc

I run Debian Stable. I wanted something i could just set and forget. I don't need updates, or want them outside security stuff. And i want stability. My machines pretty old so i dont need newer drivers or anything anyway. It also has all the software i need.

Wanted to try out wayland and fedora was recommended as the best experience for that during those years. Discovered the most polished, stable and smooth Linux experience I'd had to date. Mostly used ubuntu distros and arch before. Never looked back. Upgraded to Silverblue to try out the future of linux. Haven't changed anything since. Been about 3 years now on Silverblue.

Debian stable (ok, writing this on Debian Trixie which is not stable yet, but nonetheless works w/o trouble in a virtual machine).

I am using Debian for work and on my servers.

Why Debian? Because for my use cases there are no real alternatives at this moment.

• I need stable support for Aarch64 and AMD64, which already rules out nearly every other distribution
• For desktops I use a highly customized Gnome, which takes some work and my workflow depends on a few plugins, which rules out Fedora
• For work I need some 3rd party software repositories which again rule out fast moving distributions and other non mainstream distributions
• By now I think I run Debian and distributions based on Debian for nearly 3 decades, everything I need works stable and good enough at this moment and I accumulated a lot of knowledge about how things work in Debian
• Some of my hardware needs workarounds (not because it is too new), and again I know my way around Debian and how to patch/fix things for my hardware
• It is nice that I can use Debian for my desktops and my servers on all hardware I own, I would not want to have to learn different Linux systems for desktops and servers or have different versions of software (think Fedora vs. RHEL/CentOS/Alma etc.)

Every 6 month I'll boot Fedoras live cd and play around with the newest Gnome/KDE, but seriously, for at least the last 5 years I never feel like essential improvements are pushed in the newest iterations of Gnome/KDE and I can happily wait the maximum of 2 years until they are released with Debian.

Saying that, I also own a Steam Deck and as an entertainment/media station I totally love what Valve is doing there. I would also be totally happy to run a De-Googled ChromeOS if it would support all the platforms/software etc. I need. For containers I'll also happily use Alpine Linux, if it is possible, but again, I'll mostly default to Debian simply because I know my way around.

In the end, an operating system is just a necessary evil to allow me to do what I want to do with a computer. As long as I have a stable OS which I can tweak to my liking/needs automatically and central package management, I am good. (Unless it is your hobby to play around with your operating system ;-)).

debian bc i want a rock solid system that i don't have to worry about maintaining and i don't give a fuck about the most recent versions of stuff

LMDE because it's Mint and a recent Debian stable.

I use Debian-Testing. It's very stable, more so than most other distros IMHO (despite being -testing), and it has the latest packages.

EndeavourOS - I jumped around distros a lot but always found myself coming back to arch. Then I found Endeavour which is just arch with the same basic setup I would always end up doing, so out of convenience I stuck with it

I use my distro because my Arch friend in true Arch user fashion needed to remind me every day that I was using a Debian based distro. He'd rave about pacman being far superior to apt-get. Every time I couldn't find some software I was looking for, he'd point it out on the AUR.

I had just swapped to Pop_OS!, so I grabbed Manjaro just to get him to stop. I fully expected to be back on Pop at some point, but I'd give it some time. After about a month I didn't want to deal with the hassle of swapping again. That didn't last long as the distro hop urge set in. So I tried EndeavourOS, because I kept hearing bad things about Manjaro.

Then I went back to Windows for a while because a game I was looking forward to playing wasn't Linux supported yet. The game wound up being shit and Microsoft dropped news of their shady snapshot crap and putting ads in the start bar. By this time my Arch knowledge outweighed my Debian knowledge. Fedora and openSUSE were still intimidating, so back to Endeavour I went.

I broke my build and decided to try another distro, CachyOS. It was nice, clean, and fast, but the miscommunication with foss devs was high because Cachy mirrors update a fair deal slower than the Arch/AUR mirrors do, so I'd be making bug reports of a bug that was fixed two days prior. I thought about using Reflector, but didnt know where to even begin to implement it into Cachy. So now I sit on vanilla Arch and he's using vanilla Debian. What a world...

I use Debian on machines I don't want to fuck with or have change much.

I use Endeavour because it was recommended to me for the bleeding edge hardware I had just bought for gaming.

I use PopOS on my desktop. I was looking to upgrade an old Chromebook and while researching my options came dangerously close to buying a MacBook Air. Decided to buy an android tablet instead for my portable computer and bought another SSD so I could dual-boot on my desktop.

It's clean, somewhat macOS like in appearance but I actually have freedom to do what I want. Just in time for Windows 10 sunsetting too.

I'm used to debian, it was the first on the list of distros I downloaded to try and it worked right away, so I kept it. Overall, Pop Os is unintrusive and works, so it's perfect for me.

I'm mainly on Linux for over 20 years (still have one Windows Box for VR and some games, hopefully I can migrate this to Linux with the next hardware iteration). I was on Suse, Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Ubuntu, QubesOS (which does not self-identify as Linux-distribution) with Fedora+Debian Qubes. I never had those installed on my main machine, but also worked a lot with kali, grml, knoppix, dsl, centos, Redhat and certainly a bunch of others.

The absolute best for me, as working in it security and with different customers, is QubesOS. Sadly my current laptop is so badly supported by QubesOS that it burns 6h battery in 25 minutes and sleep/suspent does not work at all, so I'm currently on Ubuntu (which I hate for their move to snap and being Ubuntu in general)

Arch on the Desktop, Debian on the servers for peace oft mind.

Why do you use the distro you use?

I've used many distros over the years (and test spin up many in virtuals to see what they are like) but keep coming back to Debian. I also like vanilla ice cream.

Fedora because it just works and I don't have to mess with it.

Alpine!

More stable then arch, but just as if not more lightweight and customizable. I have nothing against systemD or GNU but for my usecase I just want something small and simple

Mint on my work PC, because my dear IT colleagues made the effort to provide standardized installations for us that are mostly carefree and can just be used; you can even get them preinstalled on a laptop or VM.

Debian on my work servers, because everyone is using it (we're a Debian shop mostly) and there's a standardized self service PXE boot installation for it. Also, Debian is boring, and boring is good. And another thing, Debian is the base image for at least half of the Docker images and alliances (e.g. Proxmox) out there, so common tools. The .deb package format is kinda sane, so it's easy to provide our own package, and Debian has a huge community, so it's going nowhere in the near future.

Ubuntu LTS latest on my home servers, because I wanted "Debian but more recent packages", and it has served me well.

Not yet, but maybe Fedora on my private PC and laptop soon, because I keep hearing good things re hardware support, package recency, gaming and just general suitability for desktop use. There's still the WAF to overcome, so we'll see.

I've been using Garuda for... Two or three years? I've done a lot of distro-hopping looking for something that won't just break on me. I used Ubuntu for a long time but kept running into situations where it would break, such as boot loops. Eventually I settled on Garuda because it ships with newer software and Nvidia drivers, which is helpful because I use my PC for gaming. I have stuck around because it's garuda-update command automatically makes a backup of your system out of the box, and you can select to boot into a backup in grub then restore it really easily. There have been a couple times where something has broken on an update, but when that happens I can immediately restore the backup, and I don't even need to remember to run a backup manually. I do feel that the default theme is a bit gaudy so I swapped it to a default KDE, but other than that I've had pretty much only good experiences with Garuda.

I use bazzite. I prefer fedora (that's what I have on my laptop) but the Nvidia drivers consistently give me trouble with fedora on my desktop. I'd get it stable for a little bit then something broke. eventually I got tired of it and tried bazzite since I had heard it was better in that regard. I love the out of the box Nvidia support as well as the HDR support with no extra steps. I'm really not a fan of immutable distros in general, I think rebuilding the ostree everytime I need to install a system package not available in any other way is super annoying, but it just works and that enough for me right now. I also enjoy some of the software it comes packaged with, like btrfs snapper and a very comprehensive ffmpeg build. I'll probably switch away from it to try something new this summer, but at least until my finals are over I just need it's stability.

I eventually decided on openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few reasons: rolling release, because I like to stay up-to-date; non-derivative, not a fork or dependent on other underlying distros; European, for (perceived) privacy reasons; a relatively well known and large distro with a decent community, for troubleshooting reasons; backed by a company, though that has both its ups and downs; lastly, support for KDE Plasma.

I actually had trouble finding a distro that suited all my criteria at the time, but openSUSE is good enough for now and I am pretty much satisfied.

The amount of software available in the package manager, without adding external repositories, exceeds that I've seen in any other distro I've used. Even with epel, I feel like others fall short.

The ability to modify the build time flags of software while still using the package manager is also huge. I hate when ffmpeg doesn't have speex support because some upstream dev figured it was a corner use case.

It's me, I'm the target demographic. I'm the one asshole who wants to build ffmpeg with speex support, clamav without milter support and rxvt WITHOUT blink support.

There are some pretty great userspace helpers too. Things to ensure your kernel is always built with the same options. Things to upgrade all your python or perl modules to the new interpreter version for you. Tools for rebuilding all the things based on a reverse dependency search.

Slotted installs are handled in a sane, approachable, and manageable way.

The filesystem layout is standards compliant.

I recall someone on /r/Gentoo saying something like "Gentoo is linux crack, when you get a handle on it, nothing compares."

When I boot my laptop into fedora/arch/mint/etc (or really any non-bsd based distro), I feel like I'm using someone else's laptop. There are a bunch of git repos under /usr/src for the software I wanted that wasn't in the package manager. I need to manage their updates separately. Someone else has decided which options are in this very short list of GUIs. I'm using whatever cron daemon they chose, not the one I want. Why is there a flat text log file under /var/db/? Why won't you just let me exist without any swap mounted? $PATH is just a fucking mess.

I'm well past the age where distrohopping is "cool" (and I don't have the time for it anymore). So I take a pragmatic approach to choosing which distro to install on my systems.

• Fedora Workstation on my main laptop because it's the distro that works better on it, it has reasonably up-to-date software without the hassle and problems sometimes present with rolling releases, and I really like the native GNOME workflow.
• Linux Mint XFCE on my spare laptop because it only has 6GB of RAM (I plan to upgrade it, but it's not a priority right now) and sometimes I lend it to my mother and nephew, and XFCE is a very easy to use DE. Also, LM is stable and does not cause unnecessary problems, and has support for the laptop's touchscreen right out of the box.
• Debian 12 LXQt on a netbook which I use occasionally, mainly when I'm feeling like just browsing Gopher and Gemini.
• Debian 12 32-bit headless on my home server, which is just an old netbook I got for free. I have my music collection on it, which I listen to via MPD. It also serves as the main node of my Syncthing setup.

I've used many others in the past (Arch, Endeavour, openSuse, Slackware, Slax, etc.), but right now I think that the Fedora-Debian-Mint combo is the best for my needs.