which distro and why do you prefer it over others?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is this question going to arise every month?

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

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

Enough said.

Shit, here we go again 🤦.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Fite me.

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)

Nixos

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

Arch, I love the AUR

Fedora over Ubuntu. Ubuntu nowdays seems lost it's soul...

Fedora and Gnome workstation is the best ootb Distro I ever hold.

Also Fedora Xfce spins ovrr Linuxmint or Xubuntu. They are first class, stable, and bleeding edge.

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

KDE Neon, because it runs Linux in the background.

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.

Short answer: Custom Fedora Silverblue image through uBlue's template, because it offers a relatively mature and easy to use distro with unique features in terms of stability and security that's (almost) unmatched within the Linux space.

Long answer:

spoiler

which distro and why do you prefer it over others?

Personally, I'm very fond of atomic^[1] distros. What they bring onto the table in terms of stability and "It just works."^[2] can't be understated^[3]. I've been running Fedora Silverblue^[4] for the last one and a half years and it has been excellent barring some smaller issues^[5]. While on the other hand, the distros^[6] I've experienced in the mean time through dual-booting happened to be a mess and I eventually couldn't continue to use them as they accumulated issues all over the place.

So far, it should be pretty clear why I prefer atomic distros over traditional ones. However, why do I favor Fedora Silverblue over the other atomic distros? Well, I try to be very security-conscious. And, unsurprisingly, this has influence on my choice. In this case; Fedora is the only one (together with openSUSE) that properly supports SELinux. While AppArmor is also excellent, it's not ideal for the container workflow atomic distros are known for; which is probs one of the reasons why openSUSE has only recently started supporting SELinux while they've been supporting AppArmor for a long time. Furthermore, while both Fedora's and openSUSE^[7]'s offerings are excellent. Fedora has been working on theirs considerably longer and therefore their atomic distros are more mature. Thus, I ended up with Fedora. Silverblue, however, wasn't actually initially preferred over Kinoite. I started on Kinoite, which I was attracted to for how KDE Plasma was relatively similar to Windows^[8] and for how it allowed easy configuration out of the box. At the time, Kinoite wasn't that polished yet. So I had to rebase^[9] to Silverblue and the rest has been history.

There are actually atomic distros that don't heavily rely on the container workflow to do their bidding and thus don't necessitate the use of SELinux over AppArmor. Those distros would be NixOS and Guix. These are on my radar and I might even switch to either one of them eventually^[10]. Heck, I've even installed the Nix package manager on Fedora Silverblue through Determinate Systems' Nix installer. But, to be honest, I'm most interested in Spectrum OS. Which I would define as the love child of NixOS and Qubes OS^[11].

Perhaps more commonly referred to as 'immutable'.
Built-in rollback capability. No system corruption due to power outage or anything. Automatic background upgrades.
Obviously, there's a lot more I like about them. I won't do a complete rundown, but the following is worth mentioning: (Some degree of) declarative system configuration. Reproducibility. Improved security.
To be more precise; at first just the stock image, but I've since rebased to uBlue's Silverblue image and more recently to my custom image using uBlue's 'template'.
As much as I like Fedora, their repos could be a lot better; both in terms of available packages and how up-to-date the packages are. Furthermore, though more GNOME's issue than Fedora's, extensions add IMO excellent functionality to the table. However, they sometimes behave very unpredictable in an otherwise very predictable environment. For example, enabling the blur my shell extension somehow forces me to log out right after I try to unlock my screen; probably caused by the gnome-shell crashing for some random reason.
Which would be EndeavourOS and Nobara.
Which would be openSUSE Aeon and openSUSE Kalpa.
Fedora Kinoite was indeed my first experience on Linux 😅.
Which actually felt like a magical experience for how easy and effective it is.
After their infamously steep learning curves have been conquered.
Best desktop OS in terms of security and privacy.

Ubuntu because it requires the least amount of hack fixes to get working.

And snap has vastly simplified software installation.

Debian. On servers, on laptops, on desktops, even on my high speed camera. It's simple, it's reliable, it doesn't push updates that break my stuff.

Nobara because I want to game on my PC headache free

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.

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.

Debian because the swirl looks cool and the installer makes me feel old and sophisticated without having to be old and sophisticated.

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.

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).

Mint (MATE). It's preconfigured closest to what I want, with just a couple tweeks I can do whatever I need with utilities and a GUI I'm familiar with.

If Its a headless machine Ubuntu or Debian. Again familiar with both can do whatever on both without having to relearn low to build a wheel.

Primarily a windows user but I do use Linux for some applications.

Kubuntu. The support and stability of Ubuntu but with KDE Plasma 5 (not a huge fan of gnome), and probably one of the more straightforward distros to use in my experience alongside Linux Mint or Pop!_OS

Nixos.
The ability to have my whole system in a git repo is what i have been looking for when i did not know it.
Steep freaking curve though and the documentation kinda blows. But its the distro ive spent the longest on apart from Arch, and i feel quote at home even though most stuff is done differently.

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.

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.

I scrolled this far and no slackware?

Arch because I'm too lazy for a non-rolling distro. I should really set up snapshots and my dotfiles repo on my new laptop though (:

I'm a Linux noob so I don't have a distro preference yet but I'm currently using Fedora KDE spin. It's pretty nice.

Debain on servers because it just works.
Arch on desktops because you got basically every software package you'd ever need in the AUR and it's somewhat stable.

This has been beaten to the ground.

OpenSuse Slowroll (rolling release with constant updates plus an update burst every two months)

Prefer rolling release over fixed release.
I do like OpenSuse in general.
I install a lot of packages and want to stay up to date (security & GUI notifications). With OpenSuse Tumbleweed I have to install a couple gigabytes of updates every week. It's not ideal for me.
Too impatient to wait for the proper release of Slowroll.

Nobara bc my first year of using Linux had some rough patches, and I just wanna turn my brain off and game for a while with minimal troubleshooting.

I'll start distro hopping again soon tho

Void Linux

The name is really cool

Fine, let's have it your way.

🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 , obviously 😀 It's flexible to no end, enables trimming off the most cruft and, because of that, can be the most secure. That last bit depends on how trigger happy you are to installing packages from outside 🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 repos.

Would highly recommend giving 🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 a try ;)

I started with LinuxFT from a magazine coverdisk. I also installed it on an old 486 at the office. It became the "internet box". The company director at the time believed Bill Gates that the internet would be a fad and wasn't worth investing in and would not put any money into the company internet connection. So, it was an old 486, running LinuxFT, with a modem calling out on demand, squid proxy, email boxes etc. But it worked.

After that I moved to Redhat (before it was paid for). I remember for sure installing RH5. It was definitely a smoother experience.

Server wise, I went through various distros. Once I got to debian, for servers I never really left the "apt" world. Management wise, it's just too easy to work with. Hopping between Ubuntu and Debian even now.

For firewalls I've been through ipfwadm (Kernel 2.0.x), ipchains (Kernel 2.2.x) and iptables (Kernel 2.4.x). Now, there is some newer stuff now. Nftables, but there hasn't been a "you must change" situation like the other two and as such, I've generally stuck with iptables, mainly because when I did try nftables I had a real problem getting it to play nice with qos. Probably all fixed now, but I'm too lazy to change.

Desktop wise. I dual boot windows/linux. Linux is Manjaro, and I like Manjaro, for the fact that gaming generally just worked. However, I feel like every major upgrade I am chasing broken dependencies for far too long. But, when it works, Manjaro is great. However, I have had several failed desktop experiments. I ran Gentoo way way way back, I think I had an AMD Athlon at the time. I thought it was great, I mean building stuff for my specific setup, nice idea and all. But upgrades were so damn slow compiling everything! I tried Ubuntu, but I never found the desktop to be any good. I did also have Redhat way back in the late 90s. But the desktop was just poor back then.

Use whatever distro you feel comfortable with. That being said, there are definitely good ones and bad ones. I use Arch btw. That's the beauty of Linux tho. You can try a distro and if you dont like it you can literally install a new distro over the old one by blowing away everything but the /home partition. Did I mention yet I use Arch? I use Arch btw. The package managers are such a great tool to get a system up and running in a short time, but you can always compile everything from scratch if you want. You can config your programs with the default settings and let the OS do it for you, or you can micromanage every single config option and take a little more time to personalize your machine. I've told you I use Arch? I use Arch btw.

Yeah, Linux is great! And in case you were wondering I use a distro called Arch Linux.

I still have yet to see someone mention Hanna Montana Linux.

I keep trying other distros, and then coming back to Debian unstable XFCE. Linux Mint Debian Edition is ok. At work I did lots of Enterprise Redhat, but I'm glad I don't have to use it after I retired.

Manjaro, because it's rolling release and it's built on Arch, only the necessary stuff is installed (including a desktop environment), you can set it up with just a few clicks, and it works out of the box, and even proprietary GPU drivers are easily installable with mhwd. Stable and reliable.

In case anything breaks, there's quick help on their forum, which (when it happened to me once) outperformed customer support of proprietary software.

It's been my daily driver for almost 8 years without any major issue.

So in short, robustness, rolling release, simplicity, community.

Edit: I have to add, my use case is for a desktop PC for software design/development + a little gaming.

Arch. It has pretty great documentation and I like having the safety of knowing what's on my computer. Other than those two things, I just like arch I guess. There isn't anything wrong with other distros.

Fedora Silverblue! 😊

Immutable Linux is the future (and any container-based filesystem )

Debian for me and Linux Mint Debian Edition for anyone I help with computers, because I don't want to configure a system more than once and to investigate why some stuff doesn't work.

EndeavourOS. I like having a relatively bloat-free setup. It's also been nice because it's been easy to manage so far.

NixOS. There are lots of great things about it (like atomic upgrades, easy rollbacks, no dependency hell, safely mixing stable and unstable packages, and more) but it's killer feature is that (almost) everything about the system is specified in a single config file

Fedora Kinoite because it doesnt suck and doesnt break. Actually switched to ublue kinoite main, very close to upstream with minimal changes that always stay the same (its always the same difference, not weirdly diverging more and more from upstream).

But I dont know if it is the best model, as Fedoras BTRFS snapshots + ostree without the image based thing would sound better ? But this is not existing.

Btw Nix, Flatpak, Distrobox/Toolbox, Distrobox/Toolbox with root, Podman, Docker, layering, removal, are all things that work on Fedora Atomic. Maybe even snap if someone is brave enough to try

Gentoo because it's what I know, and I know enough to make it do what I want.

Linux Mint Debian Edition for reliability with some user-friendly additions, dual boot with Garuda’s gaming edition because it pretty much sets up everything on its own for that purpose and has the latest updates.

Arch because the packages are recent. Arch has no shiny innovation and even the performance is not that fast, but I always find a way to make everything working. It is the only distro like that for me.

I like Void because it makes me quirky.

Just kidding.

I like Void because it makes me quirky, doesn't require me to learn how systemD works, AND it is lightweight! Plus it has literally never broken on me.

I just distro hopped to nixos. I was unaware of it until I came to the fediverse. The declarative system, once you get over the small learning curve, I feel is very easy to understand and configure. Creating and being able to roll back system configurations is a great feature too.

Previously I was using void. I quite enjoy it too and am sure I'll revisit it. It's a light (no systemd) rolling release distro with an emphasis on stable packages.

zorin os. most out of box functionaility of any distro I know. its a lazy os and im lazy. just want to install and go.

I prefer Arch (btw) due to the fun of installing it and If it breaks then you that process again with onother de or a different setup

void linux. it uses runit and it's a rolling-release. i like runit because i don't like the systemctl command for some reason. doing ln -s /etc/sv/serv_name /var/service and sv up serv_name is way nicer imo.

I don't really have a "better distro" preference -- all distros can be tweaked and optimized equally, with no benefits from one another. And yes, even Ub(l)untu.

Arch is great, but it needs longer explanations considering the user needs to do a lot more. Sometimes you find them, but other times you find a snarky superuser with zero people skills.

It's a shame they aren't government standard, so I could take a local course to become a snarky superuser too.

Most of it involves everyday Linux usages, but some of it is specific to Arch and it breaks so hard. It's not a great thing when you're stupid busy and don't have the headroom to get to the bottom of it. Sometimes all you get is vague theories on how a fix might occur. After that you're playing shell games trying to debug your problems.

Definitely recommend for pro-Linux people that have a breakable laptop that can go on the backburner.

Artix with OpenRC, Arch with alternative init systems.

I've moved to Ubuntu after getting burned pretty badly with CentOS's getting mistreated and eventually killed. Ubuntu feels stable enough, both in terms of their updates/quality and in terms of their corporate proceedings (such that I won't get absolutely blasted by mandatory repos being closed down, for example).

Artix. I went Void -> Arch -> Artix. I can't help but feel that Artix is what Arch should be. Perfect blend between the Arch and Void experience.

been rockin kde neon for the last little while, but also really like mint

It may be a little behind on updates at this point, but HML is still the best.

I was Arch for a long time but now I'm on Fedora. Most of my servers are Ubuntu server, but I'm switching some stuff to fedora server. I've always disliked Ubuntu for some reason.

Arch, because of the AUR and because I can't get fully used to NixOS. Also, I know my way around Arch better tban any other distro. I tried my luck on Debian and it didn't go that well, but I'm willing to try again soon. (If only I could get Hyprland on Debian....)

Advantages: has all the software I need, new versions as well.

Disadvantages: lacks a stable branch (I recently found myself with limited/no internet access for about 2 months; if Arch had a stable release, I wouldn't have had to rebuild my NixOS system over 100 times while I was trying to get a decent DWM setup.

Arch, because I can never be happy except when I'm bickering with a machine.

Seriously, though, I like the control and the learning factor. I enjoy knowing what my computer is doing and why, AUR is great, and the documentation is generally top-notch. Once you get past the point in the learning curve where everything is on fire and you don't know why (don't forget the 'linux' package when you pacstrap, kids!), it's a delight to use

I started at Sarge, went to Ubuntu Warthog until Eft, and went Suse and Fedora but then changed to Xubuntu Ibex. I stayed until Vervet and since then have found a very comfy home in Arch.