Asklemmy

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.

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.

Windows, it's easy to set up all the games I want and I'd have to run an emulator to use a Linux distro and still play everything I want to.

The last version I paid for was Windows 7 however, I only took the Win10 upgrade when things slowly stopped working because of driver issues.

Windows. Primarily because I play a lot of PC games and do PCVR and while Linux has come a long way it's still more of a PITA to use for a lot of things.

I'm using Ubuntu with KDE Plasma. A while ago, Windows reset a lot of my system (thank the powers that be that my files stayed intact), and I decided that I was fed up with Windows and that I'd find a way to continue everything I was doing on Linux. At this point, I'm roughly 95% of the way there as I do own an Oculus Rift which only supports Windows (unless someone can point me to an article or forum post that says otherwise); I'd like to either get a Valve Index or a Quest, but I don't currently have the money.

In any case, a friend of mine recommended a flavor of Arch that included KDE Plasma (I forget the name, might be Endeavour) but I was coming up with issues that a lot of programs I had wanted to use were only built for Debian/Ubuntu so I switched again. Lovely how with Linux you can switch distros so easily. So I flashed my computer with Kubuntu and I haven't looked back since.

KDE Neon. It does everything I expect an OS to do and stays out of my way...

Desktop: Fedora Laptop: Arch

Both use KDE, though I've also played around with i3/sway/hyprland on my laptop.

I used to have Windows on a separate partition, then on a separate hard drive... Once I realized I hadn't booted into it in months I got rid of it completely and haven't looked back.

Gaming was one of my last tethers and it's gotten so good in recent years that at most I only need to do some minor setup and tweaking, if that. Proton ,Vulkan, and DXVK have really made it all possible.

QubesOS (with Debian and Whonix AppVMs) or TAILS

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

Fedora Silverblue. It's one of the closest to a ChromeOS like "no maintenance" Linux distros with still a lot of Linux feel. I just don't have the headspace to maintain reliably anymore.

* tips Fedora*

GNU Guix System. 100% free software, focus on reproducible builds, declarative configuration, packages are just Scheme modules stored in a git repository. I've written packages for guix (I helped with the Icedove package) and find it to be fairly straightforward once I understood the syntax and basic data structures.

One particularly nifty feature of guix is that you can specify a commit or version number to build a package with, so if the package is out of date you can still get the latest version (assuming it still builds of course).

Windows 11. VR sim racing isn't good on Linux yet.

There's a lot I love about Linux, and when I ran a potato computer and ran my own business and had a PS2/3/4 for gaming, Linux was awesome. Got into Destiny back in the D1 days so when I built a PC in 2020 I definitely wanted to play D2, which meant I had to run Windows. By that point I had also been running Windows at work because I need a lot of Adobe and Excel so it wasn't too bad to switch.

I dual boot Windows and Arch Linux. I only keep Windows around for some games that don't work in Linux currently, as well as the occasional software that doesn't have a Linux equivalent (or the equivalent has issues such as compatibility) though. Mostly everything else is done in Linux, and I'm quite happy with it!

As for the "why" on Linux, I've always loved interacting in a CLI environment, and enjoy the dev experience on Linux. And as cliche as it sounds, I do like "owning" my system and feeling like I actually get to make executive decisions as to how/what it runs.

Gentoo gang

Trying to balance all the libraries and programs I need for ham radio, astronomy, CAD/CAM, emulation (VMs and consoles), containers, gaming, flight simulation, and software development basically requires the granularity of fine tuning it provides.

Windows 11 on my gaming desktop because it's still difficult to beat in gaming workloads (although Valve is doing promising things with SteamOS along with the advancements in Proton and Wine) . macOS on my school laptop due to the battery life and great developer tools along with it's integration with iPhone/Airpods. Arch on my project laptop because it can run almost anything I can download off of Github and it has a great software library with the AUR. I'm not really loyal to any operating system, I just use what I think is the right tool for the job.

Windows 10. I got a Ryzen 5900x that works fine on an old bios version. Upgrading to windows 11 requires me to upgrade the bios or get tTPM stutters. However, the new bios versions reduce the (single core) performance...So I'm sticking with windows 10 for now. I have windows 11 on my laptop and don't mind it. Tried Linux multiple times over the past 15 years, but it always kills itself within weeks. As a server it works well though.

Windows 10, mainly because two factors: I use a lot of macros on office at work, and Clip Studio Paint... But I'm considering going full Linux once Windows 10 goes EoL, since CSP is going with their subscription model I plan on using Krita. I just need to see if I can use my work files with office+wine

Using openSUSE Tumbleweed on my main PC. Works very well for my use; probably my favorite rolling release distro.

Fedora 36 on both my desktop and laptop. (that's GNU/Linux). Its not the latest because I have outdated hardware. Occasionally dual booth Windows for Valorant and FL Studio.

As to why. I enjoy an Operating System where I can change everything. For me this is Linux. I customize to the point where everything works then I don't touch it. I used to be obsessed with changing stuff. But this way I have it the way I like it. If anyone is curious, go check out [email protected]

Void Linux on my Thinkpad and Thinkstation. On Pinephone and Pinetab I'm running postmarketOS. I really like postmarketOS and using apk, so if I were to get a new laptop or every change the distro on my laptop or desktop, then I might try Alpine. On raspberry pi 3, it's raspbian. I use that mainly to run pi-hole and pivpn.

I distro hopped for a little while, but then settled on Void. It does what I need and was easy to get set up how I want. It's a rolling release and I haven't ever had any big issues with upgrading. The worst issue I've had was when they recently removed pipewire-media-session and switched to wireplumber. After checking a couple posts on reddit and on void's documentation, I got it set up the recommended way without any trouble and audio is working fine.

edit: wanted to add that my Thinkpad also has OpenBSD as a dual boot option, but I haven't booted into it in a long time. One day I'd like to try a BSD as a server(not on a laptop, of course.) Also, the Thinkstation has Windows 10/Void dual boot, but I never boot into Windows.

manjaro and win11 for some obscure things I need it for.

I have one desktop running windows 11 home and one laptop running Ubuntu 22.04. I use windows 11 for gaming and some windows stuff, and Ubuntu as my daily drive. The reason I use ubuntu is simple, It's a tradeoff between new software and stability especially with my stupid nvidia graphic card. I tried Manjaro too, but sometimes after I updated the gnome DE, gnome-shell just somehow stutter and leak.

Zorin OS right now