Asklemmy

Arch because of the neofetch

Windows 11.

I just require Windows for a lot of software. The thing holding me back from switching to a Linux distro, used to be Adobe Premiere and Adobe Photoshop. I have since moved to DaVinci resolve, and I also purchased the Affinity Suite.

Now the problem is that the Affinity Suite doesn't support Linux either..

It's getting exhausting trying to make Linux work for me, and I already have to give up a lot of stuff, and make compromises, so I'm just sticking with Windows.

This week it's arch, though I do dual boot win11 specifically for iracing and iracing alone as that doesn't let me run it under proton.

Ubuntu Mate on two main PCs. One running windows ten for TurboTax 😭

Windows on my PC (ugh) and Fedora on my laptop, been thinking of moving the PC to linux mint, but still a bit hesitant.

Arch because:

• it is the only distro I could install my wifi drivers on when I started with GNU/Linux
• too poor to afford hardware for Gentoo
• bloat = bad
• spyware = bad
• Appl€ & Micro$oft = bad

Void linux with swaywm. Its blazingly fast and I lime to tinker

Currently, Ubuntu. I've been flinging back and forth between Debian, Mint and Ubuntu for years.

It works for my goals. I can even play my halb dozen computer games. I don't need to deal with MacOS prices or annoying "must be Apple hardware to run" [I could run a Hackintosh but why?], and I certainly don't want to touch Windows with a 3m pole in my machine.

Windows 10. Why? Because 80% of my creative software doesn't work on Linux and I dislike Apple products.

OpenSUSE on Desktop, macOS for laptop. I’ve used macOS on portables for years now but only in the last 3ish months have I gone the linux Desktop.

As to the “why” - macOS because it’s polished, tightly integrated with the hardware, the ecosystem works harmoniously, it’s secure and Unix-based (Darwin is the name of the base OS used for both macOS and iOS).

For Desktop - I used Windows pretty much all my life but it’s gradually turned into a bloated advertising and tracking engine. I’m speaking as a home user and a 10+ year IT professional. Linux has come in leaps and bounds and OpenSUSE is an enterprise-grade OS that also happens to run games and other personal things nicely. If I wasn’t using it I’d probably be using Red Hat but I dumped it largely due to their shitty business practices.

Arch Linux (old laptop) and Windows 10 (on my gaming PC, at least until it reaches end of life, then it's all gonna be linux)

Manjaro i3 as my personal machine.

Mac OS on M1 MBP as my primary work machine.

Win 11 on the company-provided laptop, primarily for when I need Windows-only software (Visual Studio, etc.) or run labs in Hyper-V.

Zorin OS right now

I have a lot of PCs for different purposes, so this answer could probably be considered cheating. It really depends on what I am doing. I'll go in order of Highest usage to Least usage, and separate professional usage and personal usage.

Personal

• Future gaming PC: PopOS
  • Maybe breaking my own ordering rules a little bit, but this will see the most use when I'm done.
  • I am currently in the process of building this.
  • I am finally going to try to not use windows for gaming, it's possible it could be futile, but Valve's work on Wine/Proton has made amazing strides.
• Previous gaming PC: Dual boot Ubuntu 22.04/Windows 10
  • This is likely to become almost primarily an Ubuntu machine soon.
  • Not compatible with windows 11, the windows part is around only to preserve files at this point
    • Once I copy everything I want and need, I will see if I can move my filesystems around, this will probably be a huge pain.
• "Gaming" Laptop: Windows 10
  • This is merely my most powerful laptop, it would never outperform my future gaming PC, but it's certainly a lot more convenient.
  • I'm considering switching over to some flavor of linux at some point, but I'm not ready to do that yet. (Plus I have to see what works with this laptop)
  • It is compatible with Windows 11, but I'm not sure if I want to do that. (I may do it just to get the free license, if I need to)
• Media laptop: Windows 10
  • Originally a "gaming" laptop, it can't keep up nowadays.
  • I converted it into a streaming platform for my console games
  • Not compatible with windows 11, so when it goes out of support I will need to find an alternative.
    • This will be tricky, the last time I tried to install Ubuntu on it, I got kernel panics during the install process. I'm sure there's something I'm missing to make it work, but I don't have the time/patience/urgency right now.
• College Laptop: Ubuntu 22.04
  • I used this primarily for college when I was continuing my education.
    • It made connecting to the University's Linux servers a lot easier.
  • Has a development environment set up on it.
  • The least powerful "general purpose" computer I have
  • I'm not sure what to do with this computer now.
• "Pi Hole" Raspberry Pi: Raspbian
  • Used as my personal DNS server.
  • Kind of single purpose at the moment.
  • I'm not sure if I should use it for anything else?

Professional

I'm not going to list every computer here, so I'll just categorize them by purpose.

• Development: Windows 10
  • I'm a .NET Developer
  • Visual Studio Enterprise requires Windows 10+
• Server: Windows Server
  • For deploying web applications
• CI/CD : Various Linux OSes
  • Used for version control servers and CI/CD Pipelines

I personally find Operating Systems to be situational. I wouldn't say one is really better than the other. However, I've been moving away from Windows for personal use lately, as I've been getting more and more frustrated with the overall user experience. I know that custom shells for Windows exist, but I don't know how good of an idea it is to use them.

Windows 11. Because my PC comes with a 12th gen Intel processor, and from what I've heard Windows 10 doesn't really know how to address the P and E cores properly. I've tried both Linux and macOS, they're both not my cup of tea, and I keep finding myself crawling back to Windows.

On my old laptop, I was using Windows 10.

My personal PCs all run Linux Mint my work PC is Win 11 because we need to use Ms Office for certain things.

I use Solus OS . Pretty much the perfect distro for me , I have tried so many distros (ubuntu , mint , endeavour , fedora etc) but no one felt as smooth and snappier to me as solus . Eopkg(it's package manager) might be limited but has all the softwares I need m so no complaining from my side . Also I like how fast it is . Solus is a rolling release distro and is still very stable , never encountered any problems with it . I was afraid that it may die and started looking for alternatives ,sadly never found one as good as solus to me . But thankfully Solus's founder and buddies of budgie's lead are back and making sure the project isn't dead.

After using Pop OS for about a year I'm going back to Debian. I missed the stability and the new Debian 12 is very polished.

I have three laptops.

My late-2010s home laptop runs Debian 11, because strangely nothing else will boot anymore.

My late-2000s ThinkPad runs Arch, because I like pacman and a ThinkPad like that needs a hackery OS. BSD, Slackware, Void and Gentoo would also fit, but I prefer Arch.

My mid-2000s MacBook runs GNU Guix. Not really sure why I picked it, but it's a working system on fussy hardware, so I'm happy. However, being a Mac, this doesn't really count as a PC.

Fedora, because it works well out of the box, and I like GNOME.

Windows 10 on my desktop. I game and work on it, and there are applications for my job that I can't get to work on Linux (even on Wine).

My laptop is on Linux (Endeavour OS). It's my portable device and I don't use it for work so Linux, imho, is my best choice. It's pretty old as well.

Garuda Linux on my laptop, because I need a system that can play my absurd steam library, emulate like a champ, compile a wide variety of things easily, and support an array of random other tasks like media dumping and ham radio programming. It's treated me well thus far.

I'm using Linux Mint on my laptop simply because it's the one I'm most comfortable and in love with.

I had a windows 7 desktop that I muddled through the process of setting up a dual boot with Ubuntu. I could not get certain programs to work that I needed to use for work, so just left that partition in place and went back to Windows 7. Partly because I'm not OS tech savvy and not certain how to remove it and partly because I have a new computer that is Windows 10 and is my daily driver now. The Windows 7/Ubuntu computer is now just sitting in the spare room running an RTL-SDR dongle using Windows 7 as an AIS feeder. I'd set that up on the Ubuntu partition but haven't had a chance to learn how to do that yet.

Ubuntu guest, Windows host. Windows - good enough for most things. Ubuntu - open to neglect, unlike Arch. Easy to work with, i3wm is amazing. Allows me to do actual “work” without having to learn how people program on windows.

Windows for when I'm gaming and anything else Popos. Linux is getting more support than ever for games thanks to valve/steamdeck though so I find myself switching back to Windows less and less

Arch Linux

• AUR
• Up to date packages + AUR, so no need to manually install things or search for third party repositories
• Arch wiki
• I started using it and it works
• etc.

Windows 11

• laptop ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Arch linux - Love the bleeding edge side of it, as well as the AUR, and wanted something with a bit more learning potential than Fedora, which is what I was previously using.

Linux since Windows XP. Windows Update broke me.

I use a wide variety of machines, but my main desktop runs windows because I pretty much do nothing on it but play games. I have installed arch on another drive but for me an OS is either one or the other, so I mostly stick with windows because, like I said, games just work on there. That being said, I am in love with arch from using it on my school laptop and would love nothing more for everything made for windows to just work on arch.

Edit: Because another comment mentioned it, another reason why I stay on windows is for VR

My daily driver is a MacBook but I have other machines running Windows and Pop! OS (System 76)