Linux

Arch on my desktop and laptop. Debian, Gentoo, OpenBSD on servers

Personal gaming PC - Nobara (Fedora base with lots of gaming-specifc kernel optimizations baked in.)

Personal laptop - Linux Mint

Business laptop - Linux Mint Debian Edition

Junk/Test laptops - Void

Home lab main hypervisor - XCP-ng (Highly customized Fedora under the hood.)

NAS - TrueNAS (Debian under the hood.)

Virtual servers - Mostly Debian, but a few Alma Linux VMs to get that RHEL experience. Ubuntu Server for my self-hosted gaming servers.

Steam Deck - SteamOS (Valve's immutable spin of Arch.)

Arch on my personal machines, Debian on my servers.

Debian on everything (well except the router is on OpenWrt).

First installed Debian more than 25 years ago. Tried some other stuff, Debian is still best for me.

Ive swapped around but for now im good on Arch, I like the AUR too much and tbh it does what I need (other distros are great and I installed Debian on my families computers but for me I use Arch).

I started using Linux in 2016, I stopped distro hopping with arch and I'm using it since 2019. But I'm looking forward to try nix like OSes like guix. I see the value of it, it's just too much hassle right now. Meanwhile I'm using aconfmgr for tracking my modifications in my system.

voidlinux now exclusively. previously: fedora, redhat, gentoo, ubuntu (briefly when it first released), yggdrasil, SLS

Debian.

Arch, diving slowly in NixOS

If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?

I distro-hopped every few years until about 2015. Since then I've been trending toward Debian for everything.

Debian stable, it works fine for a workstation and for the few games I play

Arch since years. Never had issues

Debian on the streets (servers), Arch on the sheets (laptop).

Recently switched to Arch, the archinstall script is amazing and gets you all set up. much better onboarding nowadays and is great to use.

Debian and alpine. Coming up on 27 years of linux for me.

I hopped around a little but settled into Debian a long, long time ago. My son loves Arch, I like my stuff to be a bit more stable and don't have the time to update between commands all the time (its a joke but has a little truth to it).

Slackware. In 27-ish years of using it, it's never once crashed or failed to install

For almost 30 years Debian somehow.

I started with Slackware in the early 90s, moved to Gentoo in 2004 after using FreeBSD for a while, and Arch linux since 2007. Gentoo was too much work (both for my and for my CPU's) in the long run. It has been more predictable (in spite of being a rolling release) for me than anything else,

I have been using unixes since 2000 and technically a bit before that as a user in school systems and linux since 2005. I am currently using zorin but have a long term trial to go towards and image type of system like bazzite. Thing is I have been doing this stuff to long and now I prefer to have stuff that just works and go rather than having to futz around. So my emphasis is on lazy linux. Its kinda funny because I sometimes talk about why I do and don't do things at the command line and I will get responses about learning it more and I kinda got to roll my eyes.

I think I started back in the day with Ubuntu Gnome, with some dabbling in Manjaro and then Arch.

But since then I have used Fedora Workstation, and then Fedora Silverblue / Fedora Kinoite (immutable versions of fedora, with the past several years on Kinoite [kde] over Silverblue [gnome])

On the server side of things, I am using Debian (with everything running in podman containers).

If I were to consider migrating, it would be to migrate my laptop to secureblue (likely, rebasing the OS image rather than clean-installing) and migrate my Windows 11 desktop to bazzite. Both of these are still based on Fedora's immutable base, albeit with changes to the base OS image. At some point in the future, I would also consider migrating my server to an immutable OS, however, which one remains to be seen.

Arch, btw

LMDE on desktop. MX Linux on laptop. Nextcloud server runs Ubuntu. Homelab server on Debian.

My Linux journey began with Fedora before I transitioned to Manjaro. Following the issues there, I switched to Debian, though I eventually moved on due to its slow update cycle in favor of openSUSE. I’ve now settled on CachyOS, and I couldn't be happier. It is exceptionally stable, benefits from timely Arch-based updates, and performs incredibly fast. Ironically, even though I'm not a gamer, I find that CachyOS simply makes everything work perfectly.

i've been using arch as my daily driver for 4 years. but i am thinking of switching to chimera linux. i really like apk, i think using dinit, llvm, musl and *bsd core utils would be great. for server, i use proxmox as my hypervisor, and debian for most vm's, starting to use alpine on lxc. I am using openwrt on my router.

Debian on every last one of my computers and servers

Work (Datacenter): RHEL, some SLES

Desktop: Kubuntu (just works, more or less - start with minimal install to avoid snaps)

Steam Deck: runs arch btw

KDE is ideal to me given performance and polish, things like fractional scaling and Wayland are all top tier. I use Kubuntu but am waiting on "KDE Linux".

After years of distro-hopping, I settled with NixOS 7 years ago and kept on expanding my setup to accommodate for my new demands from it. I might be hopping to GNU Guix at some point in the future because of their choice to use scheme as the configuration language for the Guix setups.

Question to users and distro hoppers. I've grown to love Mint used it for years. But sometimes it updates and moves my game folders, loses my saves and I have to hunt in my system and hope I find my precious years long game saves.

Is there such thing as a distro that never changes the structure where truly all my files, system files, games will all be the same over years?

I've tried NIX and liked it, I've tried LMDE and Stock Mint with Ubuntu bugs yay, I've tried base Debian 13, and lastly Fedora kinoite..

Whats a system that updates but doesn't lose my shit when I just want to game and use my PC? I like having all my files never move, structure of system never change, but having the ability to run steam and heroic games of all types. I'm still back to Stock Mint Ubuntu but dammit if they don't introduce bugs sometimes. Like suspend / resume audio doesn't work after sleeping my desktop and back on without restarting.

I've been on nixos for a year or so now. The learning curve is steep, but I feel it worth it for the reproducibility and config control.

33 years with Linux (kernel 1.2.13, slackware). Worked at a distro. Worked in OS security -- Unix and enterprise Linux. I helped build United Linux out of the dismembered corpse suse kicked over the fence as 'collaboration'.

Because of the validation issue in the .deb package format and others, I'm on a mixture of Rocky and Nobara.

I'm subscribed to cloudLinux's tuxcare enterprise updates for some older stuff, and I can't recommend it enough. It's excellent; and if almalinux releases their sLTS distro release and actually covers it for 25 years, that will be such a coup.

I'm worried at the direction Linux has been taken by IBM and I hope it can be unfucked one day. I miss the reliable, fast boots and uncomplicated tooling before this systemd shitshow.

inb4 everybody except the people who have actually been daily-driving linux for 10+ years have an answer

fwiw I use Mint

Arch on Desktops&Notebooks, Debian on Servers.

I started using Linux around 2006, did lots of hopping from the first attempt and eventually landed on arch Linux which ran on my main pc laptop until march 2026 when I decided to switch to void Linux. I also have a 2nd laptop which is more just for family and retro gaming, which is Debian. I also have a raspberry pi4 with Debian based raspberry pi os, as well as a mini pc server running Debian.

As you can tell, I don't like derivatives. I am really fussy with my setup and prefer to build my own system from scratch to some extent, even if I end up with something more similar to one of the derivatives.

Nobody can really give you advice what to use though, it's a very personal thing. All the distros offer different features and solutions for different use cases and problems. For people to recommend a distro, you would have to outline everything you want and expect from the distro, what you like and don't like etc.

NixOS so I can keep my config in git. I have a single nix config for all my machines (desktop, laptop and server) so I can share configuration between them. I use it to configure both my system and my user config, my dotfiles, with home-manager. Even my neovim config is in nix thanks to nixvim.

I don't think I could go back now. It can be a bit of a pain from time to time and the learning curve is steep but it has so many advantages. Being able to rollback between config versions (called generations), having a consistent config between my machines, having it all in version control… The repo have so many packages and when there is a module it's really easy to add a service. Writing new packages (derivations) and modules is also not that hard. It can be as simple as calling nix-init.

Had my main ssd fail on me a few month back and it was very simple to just replay the config and just get everything working as before. I only had to do the partitioning by hand (it can be done by nix but I've not gotten around to it yet). That's why I only backup data and home partitions, not system partitions.

Started with Slackware, basically when Slackware came out. Now either OpenSuSE Tumbleweed or Fedora because I can't be arsed to meddle with my machine for days to make it work. I just want to use it, not tweak it.