What distro do you use and why?

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

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.

Ubuntu because I'm old, uncool, and tired

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.

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

I went into void as my first DIY distro, mainly because I wanted to mess around with window managers and it was a very good experience. Runit made my underpowered laptop boot into linux in like 4 seconds, crazy fast. XBPS package manager was always really really fast too. I like the fact that nearly everything you need is in the official repo, instead of having to delve into the depths of something like the AUR. I also managed to make a contribution to the repos with the help of the community on the IRC chat rooms which were very noob friendly. Overall just a solid experience.

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.

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.

Devuan because I don't like systemd

I started with mint cinnamon and then tried out bazzite and nobara but they both gave me issues so I'm back to mint because it really does "just work"

My server is running mint currently, but I'm going to switch to fedora at some point soon. Mostly because I have to deal with RHEL at work and I'd like to better familiarize myself with it.

mint cinnamon because on my system it has no major issues and everything is easy to configure. i don't have a lot of spare time so i can't spend hours or even days troubleshooting why something won't install or run. most other distros have been annoyingly buggy or too difficult to set up.

Pop. I just need ubuntu without snap, distro's default look doesnt matter since I'll just use sway/i3wm.

Though the fact that they're building their own tiling DE could make me stick with it fully when it comes out.

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

Yk what I LOVE THAT, Why i liked linux mint when i was new.
Well technically Mint has one terrible default nowadays that is hidden unverified Flatpaks.

Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.

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.

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.

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.

Fedora Silverblue

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

I use the Bluefin flavor of Silverblue. I like not having to tinker with my laptop to keep it working, everything happens in the background.
Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.

Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.
I like flatpak

i am kinda the opposite of you, i find flatpacks meh its alright.

Gentoo because I like it.

And portage.

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.

The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.

Prob the reason why i hated garauda (Idk if is it because i picked the dragonized gaming ver)
- Probably. I'm definitely not a fan of Garuda Linux (never used it to be honest). The styling and the bloat are not my taste. But the most important thing to me is, if I can trust those developers and maintainers? And I don't trust most non common distros. Looking at their webpage, they also have a KDE lite version with less bloat and bare minimum packages to get started. This is actually awesome!

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

Also pacman and the aur

Another reason why am using cachyos

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 😂

NixOS for most things, Debian on some servers as a docker host

Interesting. I’ve using NixOS many years on servers but recently also started using it as a base for docker hosts. Before that I used Ubuntu or Debian for docker hosts, but I figured out I still like the declarative approach even for simple servers like docker hosts. There’s your basic security config, ssh keys and monitoring setup that I used to do imperatively, but I much rather have declaratively now, no matter how small. And enabling docker on NixOS is just a virtualisation.docker.enable = true; anyway.
- Oh I know it's better, problem is I host some stuff my friend group relies on so I don't want downtime while I figure things out. Also, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to get NixOS set up on a VPS without native support (I'm on Hetzner and I know it's possible, it's just a bit of a hassle). It's one of those projects that I'll get to eventually, when I got time. Or so I tell myself
I recently started using compose2nix, and I'm enjoying it.

https://github.com/aksiksi/compose2nix

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.

yeah i love linux mint just works

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 wonder what you will think of lmde its linux mint with a debian base instead of ubuntu (It keeps some stuff for eg the desktop updated).
- LMDE is snappy as hell and stable as a rock
- I've seen lmde mentioned on Mint website but if I recall correctly they also presented it like a somewhat experimental version?

Fedora.

Most of the others either booted to a black screen after install, or the track pad was somewhat uncontrollable when scrolling. Older Asus laptop with separate GPU.

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.

Technically NixOS is all compiled from source too (if you disable the binary caches). It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head. Debian still holds a special place in my heart too, for its simplicity and stability!

After quite a bit of agonizing, I eventually landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I chose a rolling release distro because on my desktop I want to be up-to-date. Having used Gentoo a long time ago, I didn't want a distro that takes effort to install and set up. openSUSE is somewhat popular with an active community and decent documentation in case I run in to issues. I also considered the fact it's based in Germany, because EU has at least some decent privacy laws. I was put off by the fact its backed by SUSE, but that's a two-edged sword.

Right now I'm content with Tumbleweed, but I'm keeping an eye on OpenMandriva Lx if I feel like switching.

I wish it was not hard getting nvidia drivers on opensuse.

CachyOS. I use it because I am a fan of Arch based systems, rolling releases etc, but CachyOS is optimised for my generation of hardware, and has lots of good default configurations for various apps. They have a customised proton version, a good default fish profile etc.

tl;dr It's Arch, but optimised, and slightly more pre-configured out of the box.

Garuda for me. The reasons are similar; just replace some optimization with some convenience. It's a bit garish by default but pleasant to use.
Same thing.

I've hopped distros alot and then just felt most comfortable with arch linux. I try other distros and then just go back to arch linux everytime. I just love the AUR and the utilities that are available to arch linux. The wiki is also very good.

Fedora, it has KDE spin and quite recent packages.

PopOS but I'd like to switch to NixOS

Try it! Here’s a proof of concept that I’ve made that shows NixOS could even be used as a base for a very simple OS that abstracts the Nix away almost completely. Maybe the source code is of interest to you.

https://github.com/nixup-io/desk-os
- I need a way to backup my files between the two OS to do the move. I will look at your repo

I use EndeavourOS Xfce because it's Arch with pacman and not Flathub or Snap. Plus, I love the simplicity and the performance boost you get with Xfce (even if it's a small boost with a modern gaming PC).

yo finally someone who loves native packages more then flatpack.
- Flatpak has its benefits, but there are tradeoffs as well. I think it makes a lot of sense for proprietary software.
  
  For everything else I do prefer native packages since they have fewer issues with interop. The space efficiency isn't even that important to me; even if space issues should arise, those are relatively easy to work around. But if your password manager can't talk to your browser because the security model has no solution for safe arbitrary IPC, you're SOL.
- Flatpak annoys me

elementary! I like it, been using it since ~2018, I like its style and I don’t mind reinstalling for major updates. They’re pretty seldom if you’re on the LTS branch anyway

Xubuntu. Convenience of ubuntu, less cluttered UI.

Fedora because I like this out of the box look more than Ubuntu and it runs my games well with my nvidia card

I have one Ubuntu and one fedora server. Honestly they’re both fine.

I started using linux seriously with Manjaro, but since I didn't know what AUR really was I fucked my system up (thank NVIDIA drivers for that). Then I switched to arch, learned everything I should have known on the arch wiki. So yeah, I use arch btw.

For me i started linux seriously with fedora,Some packages was hard to get so i went with cachyos.