Linux

Arch (EndeavourOS but it's the same with an installer, basically): AUR, great Wiki, great community and fresh packages. I'm always open to new stuff but all of this is really hard to beat.

PC: Cachyos love the aur and the compiler optimizations + they compile or put aur packages in their repos which saves time by not making you compile anything

Laptop: Linux mint easy to use and stable

Phone: Android (does it count??)

Debian Sid, the unstable rolling release branch of Debian. It has the worst of both Debian and Arch!

On a more serious note, it allows me to have a somewhat standard Debian system with bleeding edge tooling.

Arch has a combination of great documentation and great packaging. I use Debian on a server but for daily use, everything I need is on Arch.

I was running only arch on my surface pro 7 and my amd desktop, then last week after an update it seemed gnome and Linux surface kernel weren't playing nice and had bricked the install. I have switch the laptop to Debian but I tend to stick with arch, like op as I am used to it, I now run Debian as it is known to be stable.

I would love to find a new distro but for me its the sunk cost fallacy, I have put so much time into learning arch and to repeat all that - this new distro would need to offer something wildly different.

Long time user of Fedora. Tried Ubuntu but came back to Fedora. But now almost migrated to Almalinux. For software app, use flatpak, which has the latest and no library dependencies. Using Wayland too on Almalinux. So not missing anything since moving to away from Fedora to Almalinux.

CachyOS is making my old ass 2012 desktop feeling snappy again. I'm by no means a pro user and everything seems to work and god damn installing and updating stuff is easy and fast!

EndeavorOS;

Gives the benefit of having latest up-to-date packages for gaming, while negating the downsides of having to configure the OS or graphics driver upon installation.

Honestly, if think EndeavorOS comes with full UI support to download stuff from AUR and Flathub, I think it would become a pretty solid OS for any casual user looking to get into Linux. (Well, unless they are religiously against Arch. Then again your casual user probably don't even know what 'Arch' is or care enough to be religious about it.)

Also yea, usually you run Ubuntu LTS or Debian Stable on servers unless your company paid for some licensing.

Why do you use the distro you use?

People said Ubuntu is easy, but I prefer green to orange so I went with Mint.

Garuda on desktop:

• wanted to try Arch
• is rolling
• has a custom KDE theme that I happen to like
• gaming edition preinstalls a number of tools that I would install anyway

Fedora on work laptop:
20 years ago it was easier to find rpm packages for some enterprise apps, then just stuck with it

ChimeraOS on minipc:
does couch gaming well

I started on Ubuntu, tried 8.04 and went back to windows XP, tried 10.04 and stayed.

20.04 was my last Ubuntu, bounced around for a while, but I have settled on Mint. Been running it for 3 years now.

Mint isn't too fancy, it is just there and lets me get my work done, very much the way Ubuntu used to be.

I'm running the 6.14.2 kernel, to get the latest drivers for my RX 9070, I'm playing around with local AI.... Mint isn't fancy, but you can do almost anything you want.

Arch and Fedora; package managers and repositories.

I use Arch (btw) because CachyOS was giving me issues.

It was the first one using Wayland by default that worked on my machine out of the box.

Arch on desktop/laptop because I'm very comfortable with it, and I can set it up the way I like.

Debian on servers because it's stable and nearly everything has a package available, or at least instructions for building.

Same as OP, but I'm not likely to change them out. I've tried a lot of distros over the years and this is what works best for me.

Artix as my daily driver because of the AUR, and I like runit. I no longer feel the need to distro hop; I'm happy here.

Laziness. I used Ubuntu, then tried a few distros based on it, and Linux Mint worked well enough out of the box.

I have a few issues with it, but i have easy workarounds so that's good enough for me.

Vanilla Arch, because for me it's the easiest to use and everything just works and never any had instability issue like other distros I tried

Started with Linux Mint. Added the KDE desktop. And I'm done. This distro does everything I want.

Home: Arch, because I'm a lazy ass who likes the AUR.

Work: Ubuntu, because the laptop they gave me came with it

Servers: I don't have a particular distro I use for all my servers, it depends on what's my frame of mind when setting the server up. But I'm considering learning NixOS for this use case.

Depends on the use case.

I use Nobara on my gaming rig because I wanted up-to-date packages without being on the cutting edge like Arch. And I also wanted all the lower level gaming optimizations without having to set it all up manually. Plus, KDE is soooooo nice.

Debian on my servers because I want extreme stability with a community-driven distro.

Linux Mint on my personal laptops, because I like having the good things from Ubuntu without all the junk. Plus the Cinnamon desktop environment has been rock stable for me. It's my goto workhorse distro. If I don't need something with a specialized or specific use case, I throw Mint on.

Arch on my old junker devices that I don't use much because I like making them run super fast and look sexy and testing out different WM's and DE's.

Void on my junkers that I actually want to use frequently because it's super performant and light on resources without needing to be built manually like Arch.

Ubuntu server if I am feeling stanky and lazy and just need something quick for a testing VM or container host in my home lab.

Fedora… it took way to long to figure out how to remove all the software I didn’t need / want and still have a functional system. I will not subject myself to that pain again 🙂

I'm relatively new to Linux, so I'm testing a few distros via VMs right now. My main desktop runs OpenSUSE Leap with KDE Plasma and I love it so far. I'm also trying Fedora 42 with GNOME, but I'm realizing I don't like GNOME. I'm running Linux Mint Cinnamon on a 2016 MacBook Pro, which is pretty nice too. I also ran Debian stable for a bit. OpenSUSE is my favorite of the ones I've tried.

Garuda - because like endeavor it's arch for lazy people, plus I got sold on the gaming edition by how much I like the theme and the latest drivers. But that's just what got me to try it, what sold me on it is when I had a vm of it that ran out of hdd space mid kernel update. I shut it down to expand the drive, booted it back up and no kernels present. Fiddling around in grub in a panic made me realize snappertools auto snapshots btrfs before updating. I think only once in my life (out of dozens of tries) has Microsoft's restorepoints actually worked for me. Booting to the snapshot was effortless, clicking through to recover to that snapshot was a breeze. I rebooted again just to make sure it was working and it did. Re-updated and I was back in action.

That experience made me love garuda. I highly recommend snappertools+btrfs from now on and use it whenever I can. Yes, preventative tools and warnings would have stopped it from happening, but you can't stop everything, and it's a comfort to have.

Debian stable:

• Works on all of my devices, none of which are newer than 2019
• Compatibility with all of the software that I use day to day
• I like my system set up in a very particular way and the stability makes upkeep simple
• I was a holdout on older Windows versions before I moved to Linux, so getting new features at all is already exciting

Debian because it just works. I am interested in trying NixOS though.

I can set everything up from two config files. If I want to set up something on my laptop I got working on my desktop it's just cut and paste.

Guess my distro

I agree, only release schedule really matters, package managers are easy to learn.. I don't think the AUR is that special either, I've always found everything I needed no matter the distro, but maybe I don't have exotic requirements.

I'm fine with most distros, though I don't bother with the fast rolling ones anymore, I did for a few years but I don't see the point for me. I'm happy with Fedora or an Ubuntu derivative and major updates are one command which is trouble free unless you've changed something in a non-standard way.

Now using Pop 24.04 as it's on a stable base and I code COSMIC stuff, oh and they update kernel/nvidia/mesa on a regular basis (I use hybrid Gfx, Intel iGPU and NV offload). I'll probably stick with PopOS or Fedora COSMIC spin/copr moving forward.

Use case for me is coding and gaming.

I dual boot Fedora KDE and Arch.

I've used Mint before and I've little to no qualms with it, but I wanted to move away from X-11, which has no GUI isolation. Hence the switch to Fedora, which has a smooth Wayland experience and also happens to have SELinux out-of-the-box.