Rock stability. Everything works. I run debian oldstable, even bookworm is too much for me at the moment. Yes, seriously. I tried to connect to my work office using azure web client and the keyboard layout was wrong. When I went back to debian bullseye, it worked as expected. By the way, this bug also happens with arch and fedora.

I have installed arch as well because sometimes I just want to play with things. I'm very interested in immutable systems, but NixOs is too difficult for me and I'm afraid I will spend too much time on it.

Debian Bookworm. On my laptop and all my servers.

I'm a seasoned professional Linux sysadmin, so getting a distro installed has never been a problem for me (thanks to my first proper distro being Gentoo).

In the end, it's the stability and "knowing what to expect", that always makes me come back to Debian.

Workstation:

Used to love gentoo, but it kept breaking on me.

Went Ubuntu until they went stupid, then arch for a while but again, breakage.

Debian works, I have to spend 0 energy on it, and I can layer on different vms and lxc for whatever other distros I want.

Server:

Was freebsd because it was perfect and jails were next level shit but people keep putting out software that was obnoxious to install without docker, so debian as hypervisor/zfs and freebsd for most apps, debian for the obnoxious ones. Perfect system.

I use Fedora 38, it's stable, things just work, and the software is up-to-date.

Easy installation, just works™, and it's basically a Debian Sid so it's relatively up to date. Siduction!

Red hat is super well supported and documented, and more importantly for me, has the amd proprietary drivers for my card. I do ai stuff so I really wanted rocm set up nice.

After trying dozens of distros the enjoyment of the new faded and I just wanted something that installed with the minimum amount of fuss and was stable as a rock. The distro that has best fit that combination of attributes (at least on my machines) has been Linux Mint.

Using Fedora

What I like: When I plug my laptop into HDMI it remember the audio settings so if I last had the audio go out of the speakers it defaults to that.

I started using Kali Linux earlier this year. I’m by no means a hacker but it’s the first version of Linux with a UI that clicked for me. It’s built off of Debian so I’m pretty familiar with its package management and it’s been really easy to get a barebones version running on different computers.

i've been distro-hopping a lot and always come back to linux mint. It's that one distro i can't fuck up when fiddling with things. it just works

Crux user here. I like the port tree system and simple package building recipes. It's also a distro that kept things very simple over the years despite the rise of dbus and systems. Also the mascot.

I use Ubuntu LTS. It's stable, things just work, and it's got 10 years of free support. That's a very long time to not worry about my machines.

Easy support for the newest Linux desktop technologies, like Wayland and Pipewire. I fun Fedora.

I use EndeavourOS, Gnome on my desktop and KDE on my laptops. I really like the AUR and the integration with yay. Started with Ubuntu about 7 years ago and had always used Debian based distros, moved to Arch when I wanted to learn more about Linux and now I use EndeavourOS as my daily driver.

On my servers I use a mic between Debian 11 and 12

I was excited when I bought an Amiga 500, and ever since then the main thing I noticed is that the EXCITEMENT of getting a computer was always over-ruled by my ability to exploit it's powers and use it.

So my perspective is that all computers and operating systems SUCK. But some suck less than others...

So using Manjaro KDE, it sucks less because it's very simple and easy for me to install whatever I like - having AUR available, being able to search with pamac to include repos, AUR and Flatpak (even snap if I was that desperate).

KDE also gives you super powers to ~~fuck up~~ modify your desktop experience and shortcuts.

It's been good to me for 6 years now. After going Ubuntu>Mint I was excited to leave Debian and try something else, I never made it to the Redhat camp (always interested to try Fedora) and hopefully will never feel the need.

So yes, what I like MOST is - it mostly just works. And when it fails, the forum is awesome.

While I know it's not the best distro, I don't care to re-image, I left that life behind with Windows.
Manjaro-
I love the fact that I can have "Stable" and "Unstable" kernels installed simultaneously. It's a nice handy way to recover or narrow down if an issue is related to the kernel. They've done an excellent job with the default Grub settings to allow this as well as side-by-siding with Windows if I want (which made transitioning from Windows to Linux easier).

MX Linux AHS because of xfce, it's fast, stable, use a recent kernel, no systemd.

xubuntu. stable and apps are reasonably up to date. i'll probably switch to mint with the whole snaps thing though. fedora is the one distro i never tried in my distro hopping phase though so...

Been using Linuxmint as daily driver now for 2-3 years. I can do all my remote work needed (Outlook using Prospect Mail, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom, Libre/OnlyOffice).

Also Steam gaming on Linux has vastly improved incl everything that works with Proton. RocketLeague and a few others I always play run perfect within proton, and I've found lot of Linux native A-titles like Tomb Raider, Dying Light,Payday2 and Warhammer that all run awesome and gave kickass graphics running natively.

TIMESHIFT has been a life saver a few times when I was messing with various AMD graphics drivers (kisak) and custom kernel like XanMod. Knock on wood it's been almost a year since any major issues though. But I know I can roll back a day or two (or max, a week) and have everything restored and running within a few hours. It's awesome.