Linux

Tuxedo OS. Same idea as smth like mint or PopOs but (imo) done much better. It also has rolling release for some stuff (like the DE) and non-rolling for other stuff (not even sure what bc I don't really look in detail). It also uses KDE plasma my favorite (and imo the best) DE. It's got pretty good app availability in terms of official packages because it is based on Ubuntu LTS (now 24.04). There are a couple things that are vestigial on most computers bc it was made for tuxedo computers but these have no negative effect on other devices in my experience.

NixOS because all the other ones differ about as much as Windows 10 from Windows 11. Guix doesn't count.

Ubuntu, because I'm fine with something that "just works"

Fedora. I like the rolling release but with large updates separated into point releases, as well as the ability to perform offline updates. I also like the preinstalled security stuff

Lubuntu

My first foray into unix-likes was oprnbsd with fluxbox. I eventually moved to openbox. Lubuntu with lxqt gives a nice simple openbox experience with a menu and stuff. I customize it to have openbox present the mouse menu instead of the whole pcmanfm desktop thing.

Arch, cause I set it up to my liking once out of curiosity when I was procrastinating, wrote a script that automates https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance and now am too lazy to switch to something else.
Especially since maintenance involves typing Update.sh once a week or so, and nothing else.

Kubuntu, because it's the most solid distro I've used that meets my needs.

Gentoo on my home computer. Started way back in the day when you had to recompile source RPMs on RPM-based distros to get CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support. Debian language support was excellent, but I didn't enjoy always being 5 package versions behind, especially as fast as some software was being developed.

CJK isn't an issue anywhere anymore, but I stay on Gentoo because it has all the packages I want, and it doesn't force systemd on me.

Will be moving away from Ubuntu on my work computer because of all the foolishness with 'is it deb or is it snap?'. Not sure what I'll go to.

Elementary OS.

I really like the focus on delivering a solid, intuitive and snappy desktop environment. It is absolutely what I recommend to newbies, who are looking for a Windows or macOS replacement.

Fedora 41 KDE at home on my daily driver laptop and desktop.

Antix on my dell mini netbook.

Multi machine VMs I manage at work run on red hat enterprise with no DE or WM.

My web app servers at work run Ubuntu server 24 LTS with no DE or WM.

My home lab runs on fedora 41 server, no DE or WM.

Been using Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment for a few years now. Does everything I need it to.

Artix because I love Arch and the AUR but networkd kept causing my home network to act like the mad hatter's tea party with IP assignment.

Bazzite for personal stuff because it looked neat and just worked after installation with a small learning curve. Due to interia I went with bluefin on the work computer for the same reasons

I use Ubuntu because it's the most popular and well-supported.

I'm going to be switching to Mint at some point because it's basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don't trust Canonical anymore, but it's hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I've been using Ubuntu since 2017.

I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I'm going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.

Arch with KDE on ThinkPad T460s (studying and bullshit pc).

Nobara with i3wm on home studio/gaming desktop. Switching to Arch on it one day but CBA at the moment.

Honestly which distro I use isn't all that important to me these days so long as I'm getting decently new kernel updates. Depending on my use case that's not even important. Used Debian LTS on a home media center for probably 8 years.

Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it's easy.

Debian. Used to use others but realized they all just added crap I didn't want, or could add myself with a simple script.

I was a Slackware then Fedora, then Ubuntu as my daily drivers (whipe trying other distros, or Kali for specific purposes) before settling here.

PCLinuxOS.

Stable and rolling for regular people OS.

Mint, first one I tried, and works just fine. It's xfce with i3wm.

Alpine:

• Rolling release (Alpine Edge) yet stable
• Extremely lightweight
• Very customizable
• After setting it up I find that it works very well
• Decently sized repo
• OpenRC rather then SystemD (I prefer the way it handles services)

2 flavors of Fedora with KDE on it:

1. Aurora-DX for some dev work on the side. Once you get used to distroboxing / devcontainers, it's rock-solid and mean dev environment (saw some minor issues with how certain GUI apps were scaled, but that's about it).
2. Nobara for gaming (tried Bazzite and it'd prolly work for that purpose as well).

Unfortunately, had to keep Windows on one other machine (fuck you KORG for not providing anything working on Linux), but that's limited to being a glorified music player now 😄