Asklemmy

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.

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

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

macOS on my laptop. I mainly care about battery life, I dislike having to carry a charger or be plugged into a wall. The M1 machines are unbeatable in this regard.

Linux on my desktop, specifically Ubuntu. No particular reason for using Ubuntu beyond that it's free (as in beer) and fits my needs: casual gaming (as in no competitive online games with anti-cheat) and web browsing.

Desktop: Windows 10

I game and I just generally am used to and prefer the ui/ux.

Servers: primarily Ubuntu. I went through a CentOS phase but lost interest when RH started screwing around.

Fedora, because it's constantly up to date and it f a s t (except when updating)

Archcraft. It's beautiful.

Arch Linux, switched to it some time ago out of curiosity and stayed because I liked the way it works.

Windows 11 on the desktop with an Ubuntu VM, Ubuntu on a Lenovo laptop, and Linux Mint on an HP 13.

Windows 10 because I can't upgrade to 11 for some arbitrary reason. I tried Ubuntu years ago but it was so much work trying to get it to just work that it really put me off. So unless the Linux ecosystem improved and by a wide margin and it has decent support for the software I use, I don't think I'm changing anytime soon.

Hate to say it, but Windows 10. My laptop doesn't support Windows 11 and Microsoft Office isn't available on linux (though I think I can do it with a windows vitual machine.) Also because of other apps like Proteus and Camtasia, or I would be on linux now. (Is it just me or are linux mint packages usually outdated?)

Windows 11. It works better on my new machine even though I had to do extra steps to suppress the tracker and such.

I use MacOS and Windows 10 on my PC. Its a hackintosh. I prefer MacOS for general computing and photography editing in Lightroom, but I game on Windows.

Manjaro GNOME w/ Pop Shell for tiling and the launcher. I mostly use it as a sophisticated virtual amplifier (Carla & Gx/LSP plugins) and for gaming. Can't imagine going back to Windows, which I have to use on my work notebook for the time being.

Windows 11:

• Games and every Software I need just works
• Everything else runs in the Browser anyway

Arch Linux for day to day/work, and windows 11 for gaming, or work if needed.

Windows 11 and Arch. Primarily the former. It just works, and I need it for work and playing co-op games with friends.

@tubbadu Linux Mint, everything I need for home is there the ONLY one I miss is amazing Affinity Suite. Incscape just isn't as good (but it's also free). I used to have a complex Excel home account tracking spreadsheet and I miss that too, but other than that nothing!

Windows 11 on my main desktop, Debian + KDE on my garage desktop, and Debian on my home server and cloud server.

I main macOS currently. And use KDE Plasma on my Steam Deck and then I have another PC that was a Windows PC that I flashed Pop!_OS on. And I really like it. It definitely feels like a Linux and macOS had a baby. But I am curious about trying a different distro.

I have a decommissioned work PC with Windows for things like MS Access or whatever strange reason I need a Windows-only application.

macOS

I’ve been a Mac user since college. I’ve got a lot of utilities and software that I’m very comfortable with, my brain is mapped to the keyboard shortcuts, and I enjoy the UX. There’ve been a couple bumpy patches in the last twenty years, but never enough to cause me to give up on the platform.

macOS - because it just works and I like a clean, consistent ui.

I tried Windows, again and again - and it just feels like Microsoft is incapable of designing a ui that is consistent. Drives me crazy.

Linux, well. I like to run it on servers. I love it. But on the desktop it remains a pain. Yes, a lot has improved over the years. But there is still a long way to go before I would consider it user friendly. And the worst part: I do not see how a consistent ui would even be possible.

My desktop PC is Windows 11, I've tried setting up dual booting but it never worked properly (probably because I wanted to have separate SSDs for each OS) so I just use Virtualbox if I need a different OS on there. I also have a laptop whose OS I change depending on what I need (generally Fedora, Win 10, or Debian) but I am considering shelling out for a Macbook as well.

I don't like committing myself to one specific OS.

Windows 10... I have Mint dual booted, but couldn't bother to make video games work on it and have used it maybe a few dozen hours at most. School had some fairly Windows-centric materials as well that made it hard to transfer over.