Linux

Been using Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment for a few years now. Does everything I need it to.

Mint, because I have a thing about maintaining a constant user experience, and it's the closest distro to Windows.

The other hard drive has Windows, because Fusion360 doesn't work on Linux. Hey Autodesk, can you hear me? Make it happen please

Mint for my desktop system. It just does exactly what I want it to, has good compatibility with software and Cinnamon is my DE of choice.

NixOS for my server, because being able to use one config repo and format for everything is so nice.

Gentoo because I like it.

And portage.

mint cinnamon because on my system it has no major issues and everything is easy to configure. i don't have a lot of spare time so i can't spend hours or even days troubleshooting why something won't install or run. most other distros have been annoyingly buggy or too difficult to set up.

I've been using Bazzite for a few months now (switched from EndeavourOS, which was great) and it's been amazing. I'm sold on atomic/immutable. I have never had a PC this stable, including every Windows PC I've had.

And it's perfect for gaming. There are weird little tweaks and settings that I had to do on EOS to get my GPU working correctly, etc., and they all just work out of the box in Bazzite (I did get the iso image made specifically for my laptop, which definitely helps). It's super impressive actually.

Arch, pacman is why

PopOS but I'd like to switch to NixOS

Mint pleb on desktop because it's stable and just works, bazzite on steam deck for installing my own games.

Bazzite (with KDE). My desktop is mostly for discord and gaming - I don't have the kind of job that can be done from home. So when I get to use it I want it to just work, and look good.

I've used a bunch of distros and I've sort of become an atomic evangelist. Which put like that sounds like a great band name.

A few for different use cases. NixOS on my wife's 14 year old laptop because it proved to handle the hardware the best, and she struggles with change so if that system dies the NixOS configuration can be redeployed identical to how she had it with no additional effort.

Debian on my old IOmega NAS.

OpenSUSE on my personal PC and Work computer, since it supports my proprietary CAD software, and nVidia releases a driver specifically for SUSE/OpenSUSE use.

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

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.

Fedora.

Most of the others either booted to a black screen after install, or the track pad was somewhat uncontrollable when scrolling. Older Asus laptop with separate GPU.

CachyOS. I use it because I am a fan of Arch based systems, rolling releases etc, but CachyOS is optimised for my generation of hardware, and has lots of good default configurations for various apps. They have a customised proton version, a good default fish profile etc.

tl;dr It's Arch, but optimised, and slightly more pre-configured out of the box.