So you chose war?

Okay, let's play this game :D Mint, because it's frickin easy and fulfills all my needs while being stable enough for my work laptop

You're playing Devils Advocate, and you probaly know it xD

Anyway, I prefer NixOS for it's declarativity, reproducibility and immutability.

Example: You want nginx with acme setup? Just tell it to, and NixOS will figure out the steps to reach the desired state.

Debian, because I can just have a computer without needing to fiddle with a million things. I work in tech and don't want to mess with any more code or configurations if I'm on my own computer. It's worked for me for 5 years and has worked for others for 30 years.

I prefer arch btw

Fedora is the perfect balance of stable and up-to-date, so that's what I'm using on my desktop. I've got Arch on another laptop too because it's so easy to use; it has my favorite package manager and basically every program in existence in the AUR.

openSUSE Tumbleweed because it's bang up to date and utterly reliable.

Fedora, it's bleeding edge, but stable enough for a daily driver. Also, most things work out of the box.

Arch or EndeavourOS, depending on the machine's purpose and my mood at install time. I prefer rolling release, and pacman + AUR is a lovely combination.

SteamOS because it comes bundled with the SteamDeck...

If it wasn't for updates deleting everything I install with Package Manager I'd have no complaints.

Daily Driver, use it for work and school, only gotten better with time

Fedora cause I can't be bothered to deal with anything distro specific. It stays as close to upstream as it can and I like that

Debiain because it's rock fucking solid.

Debian GNU/Linux because of its emphasis on free software. also, it's an operating system that doesn't make me feel its presence. couple it with a stable desktop environment like xfce and it becomes a good combo. I've installed it on all of my machines. be it server or home devices. it's my universal operating system.

though in office I'm provided an ubuntu machine, with which I'm also content since at the end of day, it's GNU/Linux. it's all that matters to me.

Shit, here we go again 🤦.

Arch because https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_is_the_best

Enough said.

I haven't used many, but after fucking with Ubuntu, Pop OS and Mint I switched to base Debian 12 and it's the cleanest my desktop PC experience has ever been. My computer doesn't do anything I'm not expecting it to, it doesn't have any bloatware, every program I've installed has worked clean out of the box exactly as advertised (except for the occasional Proton/Wine wrangling which is universal).

Debian. Huge repository, no bullshit, and basically any software for Linux is packaged/compatible with it.

You know what? Ubuntu. There I said it.

I’ve been using it since 2007 - 7.04 was my first foray into Linux ever. At present day it’s been the most “it just works” distro for me. I installed it and… that’s it. Everything just worked.

I don’t care about the “ads” in the terminal. I don’t care that it’s “bloated” (even the most bloated distro is less bloated than Windows).

If a company is porting their software to Linux, chances are they’re focusing on Ubuntu. Not Debian. Not Mint. Ubuntu.

If something isn’t working, chances are there’s a community post about it with a working solution.

It’s cool that distro hopping is a hobby for a lot of people. It isn’t for me. I want no bullshit, just set it up and let it work so I can focus on doing stuff within the OS, not setting up and fine tuning the OS itself day in and day out. And for me that’s Ubuntu.

I use Arch Linux btw

I both love and hate having control over every aspect of my system

Linux Mint Debian Edition. I mention it a lot on here, but it really is my favorite distro. I have been using Linux a long time, and I'm old. I don't care to spend a lot of time and effort tweaking and configuring. LMDE gives me everything I need and is usable out of the box, while not standing in my way when I need to get shit done.

Fedora Silverblue and Silverblue specifically. I used to run Arch and did all the cool things from DE customization to custom kernels and other cool shit with scripts and so on. Now I just want a system that I know will boot and just do it’s thing

Is this question going to arise every month?

Fedora.

They have solid community and financial backings, they do tremendous work pushing the Linux desktop forward, it's close to vanilla and the sweet spot between stable and bleeding edge (aka "leading edge") for me personally.

KDE Neon: the stability of an Ubuntu LTS base without the snaps and other Ubuntu nonsense you may end up having to deal with in Kubuntu, with all the latest versions of KDE software directly from KDE themselves. They say it's not a distro, but it pretty much is.

Nix-Darwin , DayWalker of Distros, all of the strengths, none of the weaknesses

Nixos

I have Arch (KDE) installed on my desktop at home. I have been using it for 6 years and I love it, especially the AUR! This month I have been mostly using my laptop and I am using MX Linux 23 KDE which is great! I really find it's tools very useful when I need them (which is not often, but I am glad they are there).

Arch, because the packman animation when installing packages is very nice.

Fite me.

Fedora, because the packages are up to date enough for me, and I've never experienced any breakage.

KDE Neon, because it runs Linux in the background.

Void Linux +1

It's organized beautifully. The tools are lightweight and easy to use. The package manager is a joy to use, fast and lean. Partial updates won't break your system. It's rolling but not bleeding edge which provides robustness of the system. Runit, the init system, is also a joy to use. Super easy to use and minimal.

openSUSE Tumbleweed or MicroOS. I've since long given up on so called "stable release" distros, because a boon to me is to feel like I'm not using software from the stone age, which is what I feel every time I have to use a RHEL, SLE or Ubuntu system.

I've used Tumbleweed on laptop and desktop for about 6 years. Never has anything crashed, or at least nothing has ever become unbootable. The most damage ever done by an update was a regression in mesa that made 3d accelerated content absurdly slow, but even that was fixed within a few days.

I use MicroOS on almost all my servers and it's rock solid.

zypper is slower than pacman, apt and dnf, but it's extremely usable and easy to work with, even in enterprise scenarios. I'd say it's basically on par with dnf, usability wise.

openSUSE in general feels extremely stable, and I just love that they went btrfs by default a few years back and just seem to have this future proofing aspect.

I use Arch (btw). It's not that I prefer ir over others for anything in particular, i'm just used to it by now.

(that's my personal laptop, the computers in my offices are either Debian or Ubuntu)

Arch, I love the AUR

EndeavorOS. It’s based on arch which has great nvidia driver packages if that's your thing and the arch wiki is amazing.

A nice package manager wrapper is bundled. Do yay to search for any package and install it; do yay (nothing else) to upgrade everything, and yay -Rcns to remove stuff and all their unused dependencies. I also recommend chaoticAUR which is also easy to setup. What is the AUR, you ask? A repository for user-created ways to install TONS of stuff, think homebrew (including cask, unseparated) but on Linux

For the DE I recommend MATE but you can select any of the major ones in the installer
Get synapse for a spotlight-like search; it uses the alt+space keybind by default

Nobara because I want to game on my PC headache free

Have been having great luck with the move to Linux, Garuda on my main desktop pc and fedora bazzite on my laptop.

While we are starting fights with our opinions, I absolutely love KDE plasma.

Moving to Linux has made me so happy. I feel like a computer owner / user again. It's not always perfect but nothing has stopped me dead in the water and my issues have resolved in a few minutes of tinkering.

Servers I run Debian, I do not want flashy I just want stable and tested security fixes.

I could not hack being that far behind for my desktop OS however (which I run on three different devices), so I run Ubuntu, which I remove as much Ubuntu and Gnome baggage as possible such as snaps and by running Sway.

I should really swap to a different distro that also has Debian as its root but without the stuff I don't want and Sway by default. However I also want stuff to be simple and up to date, as I make my money on my desktop PCs, I cannot afford for it to be a PITA every time I try to install patches.

I do have one PC running arch, but its mostly for the memes (and for PIKVM)

I did used to be Red Hat through and through. I started with Linux back in 98 using Red Hat CD ROMs, but I left for Debian over some previous controversy that I do not remember now, years before the Centos stuff.

Tumbleweed. I've used Linux since the nineties so I know my way around but I appreciate a sane default desktop install so I don't have to waste time fiddling too much.

People always talk about lean/fast/customizing, in reality most distros are performant and fairly lean/bloat free, it's just how Linux is. TW is no exception and like all the others it's easy to customize. I don't use YAST.

I can get comfortable almost any distro, though I prefer those with systemD+Wayland and Nvidia drivers in a repo so they update with the rest. I like rolling release, also considering the pace of Wayland and KDE development.

For new users I always recommend Mint.

I use Guix. It's fully free, it's basically the de-facto GNU system, and I like the features of the Guix package manager.