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.

Pop OS

Lots of people were hyping it in 2019/2020 so I thought I'd give it a try as my first real Linux experience. It works great and has a Nvidia driver option when I need that. So I never really tried to switch.

Distro hoping never appealed to me, but I did try Fedora, Manjaro, Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian 12.

I use Kali for work and considered swapping to XFCE DE but pop is fine.

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.

Laptop is Linux Mint, because my wife also use it and i want my laptop to be as easy to handle as possible.

Servers are Debian, because it's very light on my hardware. Mostly used for containers.

Why do you use the distro you use?

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

Variants and derivates of Debian on my servers and other headless devices because no reason except I know it, it is stable, it works.

Been trying linux for desktop every five-ten years for the last twenty odd years and went back to Windows every time because it was too bad experience despite I really tried to like it.

Except this time.

Fedora KDE on my laptop, soon on my stationary as well. No more Windows for me.

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 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.

PopOs! Familiarity, stability and the fact that it fulfils 95% of my needs perfectly.

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 🙂

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.

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

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

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.

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've used Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and Manjaro. All viable options. I'm currently using Mint on my daily driver, Ubuntu on my HTPCs, and Debian on my servers.

I liked the rolling release aspect of Manjaro, but I missed having a system that works with DEB files. I'm not a fan of flatpak/snap/appimage due to the size (I've often had to use slower internet connections). I settled on Mint for my daily driver because it has great and easy compatibility for my hardware (specifically an Nvidia GPU). It worked okay on Manjaro as well, but I've found it easier to select and switch between GPU drivers on Mint. And Cinnamon is my favorite DE, and that's sort of "native" to Mint.

I'm using vanilla Ubuntu on my HTPCs because I have Proton VPN on them, and it's the only setup I've found that doesn't have issues with the stupid keyring thing. And Proton VPN's app only really natively supports Ubuntu. The computers only ever use a web browser, so the distro otherwise doesn't matter that much.

I'm using Debian on my servers because it's the distro I'm most familiar with, especially without a GUI. Plus it'll run until the hardware fails, maybe a little longer.

I use Kubuntu. I like the KDE desktop and I like a Debian based OS. If someone is going to make their software for Linux, it will almost certainly be available at least for Debian. If, say you want it for Arch, you need to wait for someone to put it in the AUR or build it yourself.