What distro do you use and why?

Debian, because I know they won't pull a redhat ever. They do things the right way for things that matter.

Debian on desktop, Debian on server, Debian on my VMs and Debian on my containers.

I used to use Fedora and CentOS, then Fedora and Alma Linux but since RH decided to be evil I decided to go full community distro.

Debian has actually gotten really usable lately. Bookworm is fantastic and whenever I want a newer version of something I use Flatpak knowing that the base below is rock solid.

Debian Stable. It doesn't break with updates, it doesn't break when I try to customize it, it has all the software you could ever want, and it just works. It's robust, elegant, and free forever.

For most people I'd recommend a derivative like Mint, Q4OS, or SpiralLinux, since those smooth out a sometimes annoying setup process, but for me vanilla Debian is perfect.

Debian, because stability, but I wonder why each major upgrade, the nvidia drivers break forcing me to reinstall. Welcoming advice in that regard.

I'm on OpenSuse Tumbleweed right now.

I got tired of updating version numbers on Mint.

As a side note, just plugged in a years-old random printer/scanner combo my roommate had been trying to find driver's for, for hours, on his windows machine. It just worked immediately in Linux, didn't need to download anything. Suck it, printer!

I use Pop OS. Used to be big into tinkering and use Arch and all that which I still love but when I was setting up my gaming PC recently I just wanted to install something quick that worked well. It's been great so far for gaming, browsing and the very occasional bit of coding. I wouldn't say I'm super attached to it or anything but I like it.

NixOS. I’ve been running Linux since Slackware 1.0, since then have run Debian, LFS, RedHat, CentOS, Gentoo, Arch and Ubuntu. After years of Ubuntu I discovered NixOS and after diving deep into it, have never been happier with a distro. All of my machines and dot files are in a straightforward single language in a git repo. The mutable parts of all my applications are nicely isolated and backed up and I can make changes to my systems fearlessly. It has a very steep learning curve, but it’s amazing.

Mint, because I'm a basic bitch.

I rub Debian Sid/Unstable on both my desktop and my work laptop's WSL2 VM. I use Debian for a lot of reasons, but I think one of the biggest is it's the "lowest common denominator" for the entire tree base and beyond, and thusly works as much.

Some tool only offers Ubuntu install instructions? It'll work.

Something needs to be installed from source? Any needed build tools are at most an apt install away.

"Help I can't figure out why my systemd service isn't starting in Arch". Pending systemd version incompatibilities, there's likely nothing Arch-specific about that problem.

Debian has always felt like, I dunno, Latin. So many other languages are based on it, or somehow arrived at the same way to word things despite it, and so once you understand it you can mentally tie all kinds of things together when you run into something in a different language (read: OS).

NixOS

Whenever my system is in an incorrect shape, I can not only roll back to a previous one, I can go back several updates ago. But an update on NixOS could be a system package installation or a settings change.

My system settings are all in two files, both in git. There's also the versions of all of my packages that are installed into the store, each with versioned dependencies, but not globally installed so they don't conflict with each other. This is why I can have a rolling system using the stable wine version.

I also found out packaging is not so difficult so I've actually successfully packaged some of the software I use

Mint. I didn't want to fuss around with my computer too much, I just wanted to come from form work, hit power and go. Like others here, 10 years ago I was down to tinker, but now I just want things to work.
After hopping between the plug-n-play distros, Mint worked the best with my config.

I might try other distros but I always come back to Debian.

arch because it was more viable of a rolling release when i installed it 10 years ago

I use Arch, btw. And PopOS and NixOS.

NixOS all day: unimaginably stable, fun to mess around with, shared configs (including dotfiles) on every device, I really like it.

I'm still a pretty new Linux user.

Been running EndeavourOS for over 2 months because it's the distro I've had the least amount of problems with.

I ran PopOS for 3 weeks before but experienced a lot of audio issues and had my install break to a point I couldn't recover it. Glad I gave Linux a 2nd try after that, I haven't had to switch to my Windows drive a single time since installing Endeavour.

I’ve been a Linux user for a very long time. Personally, I’m currently using Mint because I don’t want to fuss with it. Seems like one of the few distros that doesn’t require a lot of effort.

Back in the day when Slackware was still new, I had the time (and patience) to compile my own drivers and kernels. Now I just want to do what I need to do and get on with my life.

Over the last decade I've tried basically every major distribution, within reason, and I keep coming back to Arch. It's easy to install, fairly easy to maintain, no bullshit added, and I can configure it exactly how I want it. And the cherry on top - alpm/pacman. This is what really pulls it all together for me

EndeavourOS - For when you love running Arch, but can't be assed to install it all from scratch again (and the Endeavour cinnamon install has been awesome).

OpenSuse Tumbleweed. A rolling release distro with a ton of quality assurance work already done for it. (Open)Suse is actually a family of distros so if I ever need a stable or enterprise distro that I'm already familiar with, I have Leap and SLES respectively.

Work - openSUSE Leap, since it is stable and has snapshots out of the box
Home - Arch Linux since it's great for gaming

Arch Linux.

Laptop - Manjaro because it works and I quite like KDE/plasma.

Work - I use ubuntu server (choice) and Turnkey Linux (legacy) for streaming internally/intranet things respectively. Most of the servers are windoze (corporate policy)

PC at home - Mint (though not so much these days because of an old nvidia card for which there is no longer support and it's not as convenient as the laptop)

I've been on Ubuntu forever, mostly because when I built my PC, it was popular. Also it's purple. I'm not on it as much lately and need to check out new distros again.

I recently built a new PC and decided to install Guix on it. I've been using arch for years (since around 2005 or so), and wanted to try out declarative system management. I also am a heavy Emacs user and love Lisps, so figured guix was a perfect fit over nix (which I do use on macos).

Used Fedora because it has some pretty nice out of box CJK support that I don’t have to configure much to use CJK input

Manjaro. I used Linux Mint, and I still have it installed, but Plasma desktop and AUR dragged me over to Manjaro. I wish Mint still supported Plasma.

Gentoo because it's systemd free-ish. Also because it has good support for musl and clang.

Running Ubuntu w Mate desktop on laptop and PC. Debian for servers. I need all my weird devices to just work and Ubuntu has the best compatibility. PopOS seems nice, but if I run Mate for me DE, it doesn't really matter, AFAIK.

Just installed LMDE on a spare laptop. I've always wanted to try Debian and/or LMDE. Thought I'd finally see what it's about (I use arch btw and nobara on my gaming desktop).

Using fedora because back then, they were the only ones to support my hardware. Have been usinc it until today, by inertia. It's a nice distro for everyday use though.

I have to use Redhat/Fedora at work, so hate to use them in any personal capacity, hence I mostly use debian or ubuntu based distros (mint, popos, neon etc.). Mostly cuz I have worked with them for so long and they simply work. However, might move to Manjaro/Endeavouros, cuz found GPU passthrough to be more efficient there.

Arch because it's rolling release and customizable. I was using Nobara until a couple of weeks ago and switched to Arch because Nobara is basically a tweaked Fedora. The switch had nothing to do with the RedHat thing. It had to do with Fedora's phasing out of X. I don't need X for very much, just actually one little game that doesn't work on Wayland (yet). I think I'm sticking with Arch forever now that I've realized how nice it is to not have to upgrade from whatever version number to the next. Gamers who don't want a lot of hassle and like out-of-the-box functionality should consider Nobara, though. I love it as much as I am enjoying Arch.

Mint with GNOME

It just works and I like the look of it, never really like cinnamon for some reason

I love love love Debian

Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and its derivatives, Manjaro, a bit of NixOS, Tails. I don't need to explain "Why?" since I don't use em for personal preference, but more like "when I'm forced to.".

Fedora

I use Arch (btw) because for me it just works. Minimal system packages, most things installed as flatpaks.

Arch, Fedora, and Debian. Think I'm going to start phasing out Fedora though.

Arch on my desktop because I customize it to how I like and don't care if something breaks (rarely does). And linux mint on my laptop because I need a more reliable distro when taking my laptop to work.

Xubuntu Minimal for me. I use my MBP for the most part, but like the idea of turning a Chromebook with soldered memory and storage into something useable for programming. The 16GB of storage on the model I bought makes it difficult to find a Debian based distro that leaves more than 1GB free. Xubuntu has been the best on that front at 4GB free. That and out of the box touchscreen support. I like the idea of being able to say that the setup I use for programming in my spare time is a $37 ThinkPad Chromebook with Xubuntu on it.

manjaro kde with bismuth tiling

Pop_os. I bought a system76 laptop and that is what came on it. It works well and is no fuss for me. Not a huge gnome fan but c’est la vie. Highly doubt a distro is going to center itself around something like xfce or enlightenment. I have distro hopped for years but for now I am happy with something I don’t have to tinker with all the time.

Fedora KDE. I just really like everything about it.

@laverabe For years I used Ubuntu on both my laptop and desktop computers. Switched to EndeavorOS on the laptop, but it would not install on desktop. I installed Mint on the desktop, but it felt like Ubuntu.

Now I am running MX on both

Xubuntu because I like a non-frills desktop that just works and don’t mind snaps.

I was using elementaryos because it looked nice and had a debian base for stability but I don't like the direction it is going so I am looking for something that is a little out of my comfort zone but not as crazy as arch. Bonus points if it supports KDE.