Linux

Debian Testing. It isn't "recommended" but it works fine.

Obviously if you want AUR you need an Arch variant, in which case just pick Arch.

from the comments, there's a split between

• linux as a tool: debian, mint, fedora, opensuse, etc.
• linux as a toy: arch, gentoo, nixos, etc.

i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it's not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want

Fedora Kinoite. I like KDE, atomic distros and the fact that Fedora is the only (at the least that I know of) distro that has proper SELinux implementation.

I also play games on this system, so having newer kernel and Mesa versions also help.

Plain old Fedora.

I know the hurdles, i know what to expect, and I've never been surprised by it.

Immutable sounds nice, AUR sounds nice, NixOS sounds nice, but i am utterly confident in my current choice's reliability and comfortable with its idiosyncracies. Everything i want to do works very well.

If i had less time/energy or had to switch, Kubuntu would be my second choice. Less frequent updates and fewer creature comforts, but also very reliable.

Bazzite, I want my PC to just work and not require me to maintain it, on top of that I need it to be game-ready and have good color management for work related stuff.

NixOS because it's the only usable stab at sustainable system configuration.

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

EndeavourOS. It's just easy to install and I basically use it like Arch

At work a mix of red hat, fedora, centos, and red hawk. At home mint debian spin. It just works and games run great. I don't have time to deal with the red hat crap if i'm not getting paid.

Fedora Silverblue. It does what I need so I can get on with my life.

I just installed Pop!_OS 22.04, after finally ditching Windows 11 entirely. I picked it because it seemed easy to use, well suited for gaming, and popular with good support.

So far, everything has been great!

I use Arch with Hyprland because it's great.

I recently installed OpenSuse, I have been using FreeBSD mostly, but have used linux through the years. I decided to go with an rpm based distro and I've always likes the chameleon mascot of Suse. I'm used to Debian based linux, so it's been a slight adjustment but it's been nice and smooth. I'm running Tumbleweed right now and all my Steam games work, as well as my 3d Windows applications via wine. It just works* I am too old and tired to spend time tweaking anymore.

No Void here?

Oh well... I surely don't use it because it's popular...

• Runit
• Pkg manager
• KISS
• Up to date / rolling distro
• But stable

Kubuntu 24.04 because it's a solid desktop and I have nothing against Snap. If it works then I don't care if it's a deb flat or snap. p PPAs were fun and exciting but I broke my system more than once with them back 10 years.

Kubuntu, because when I got my Vega 56 GPU on release day (August 14, 2017), I had to download the proprietary driver straight from AMD to get it working, and Ubuntu was the only distro supported by both it and Steam at the time. (Otherwise, I would've picked Debian or Mint.)

I don't love Ubuntu (especially how they push Snap), but I can't be bothered with the hassle of reinstalling my OS.

• Debian stable (w/ XFCE). No-nonsense, excellent community support, well-documented, low-maintenance, and runs on anything so I can expect things to work the same way across all of my machines, old, new(ish), or virtual
• Just flexible enough that I can customize it to my taste but not so open-ended that I have to agonize over every last config
• It's been around for many years and will be around for many more
• I often entertain the idea of moving to Alpine or even BSD, but I can't resist the software selection available on Debian

Ubuntu because I'm old, uncool, and tired

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.

PopOS. It was the easiest to get my Nvidia GPU set up and plays all the games that I wanna play without too much pain. I've been meaning to try something like Arch with KDE, something like what my SteamDeck is using... but I don't wanna fuck around setting up Arch.

Linux Mint, because I don't like to tinker with the system, I like good defaults (and Mints has them).

Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.

Fedora Silverblue

• I like Gnome
• I like that Fedora adopts new technology quickly
• I like how it makes updates more reliable
• I like flatpak

Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I've used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I'm comfortable with it and it's supported in every cloud environment I've touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)

I've got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I'd go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don't find much of a difference beyond package management.

Debian on most my machines. Can’t trust commercially backed distros any more. I’m tired of chacing cutting edge stuff. Like things to just work.

NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.

EndeavorOS. Because I wanted to have a rolling release distribution that is always up to date, and one that is good supported by maintainers and community. Good documentation is very important to me. And I trust the team behind EndeavorOS and Archlinux.

Also the manual approach of many things and the package manager based on Archlinux is very nice. I also like the building of custom packages that is then installed with the package manager (basically my own AUR package). The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.

I like Manjaro

• I like it
• Its user friendly if you don't want to spend a month fiddling with it
• Feels comfy and relatively lightweight

• If you are living on the edge of latest and greatest versions, it can be a pain to wait for official repos to be updated. Though I only noticed this problem with Discord desktop app, however since I realised that it spies on every process that runs and you cannot turn that feature off. Uninstalled. Problem gone. Happy me.

• Debian + Xfce on the desktop, because it (mostly, see below) just works, it's snappy, reliable, and I don't need my apps being constantly updated (I have very simple needs and use cases)
• Mint + Cinnamon on the laptop, because it's still debian-based and because unlike Debian, Mint was able to connect my AirPods out of the box and I use them a lot when on the laptop... I also quickly learned to appreciate Cinnamon, I must say.

edit: typos

I have Bazzite on a laptop for the ease of use and general resistance to breakage, and Spiral Linux in a VM. The latter works flawlessly that way, like it was always meant to be in a VM.

Gentoo because I like it.

And portage.

Arch because it helped me understand the os better and i like tinkering. Also pacman and the aur

Arch. I had some tinkering with other distros in the past but wanted to configure pretty much everything. Running it with Cinnamon. I love pacman and AUR and have been able to not break it so far after a year of being installed which is a new record for me 😂

Ubuntu for my servers, and Linux Mint for my Workstation.

I grew up using Debian-based distros, so it's what I'm comfortable with. I like how Mint seems to "just work" most of the time, especially with samba shares and usb peripherals.

Ubuntu server is primarily because it's incredibly easy to get support when you need it.

I use NixOS, Gentoo, and Debian:

• NixOS because I like declarative configuration files.
• Gentoo because I enjoy compiling from source.
• Debian because the other two are more difficult to use.

Devuan because I don't like systemd