Linux

Bazzite for my gaming pc, steam deck, and family members. It just works and they cant fuck it up. Even brother laser printers official drivers installed for my mom's comp. Gotta check the details of that cups exploit though. My gamig pc is also the fallback pc I expect to always have working and for servicing any others if problems come up.

Arch or arch based, except manjaro which has screwed me over too many times, for having easy access to pretty much any software that can run on linux, or just stuff that requires too many hoops to jump through to get working on atomic distros like bazzite.

Dietpi on my SBCs like the ones running klipper for my 3d printers

Debian for my servers, homeassistant etc, but I'm planning on checking out coreos.

Also alpine just because.

A few for different use cases. NixOS on my wife's 14 year old laptop because it proved to handle the hardware the best, and she struggles with change so if that system dies the NixOS configuration can be redeployed identical to how she had it with no additional effort.

Debian on my old IOmega NAS.

OpenSUSE on my personal PC and Work computer, since it supports my proprietary CAD software, and nVidia releases a driver specifically for SUSE/OpenSUSE use.

I use Debian on my server and Arch on my gaming PC and laptop. Both distros offer minimal installs so I can just add the packages I need and avoid the ones I don't. Debian offers a nice stable base for running my services with minimal downtime and Arch has the most up to date packages for all the cutting edge features I want on desktop.

I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can't be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.

So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.

COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.

PopOS but I'd like to switch to NixOS

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

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 😄

Guix SD because i like editing declarative ((`scheme)) config for my system in emacs

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.

Arch, pacman is why

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.

Opensuse TW. It is rolling release and rock solid. Also amazing btrfs implementation.

OMG I use cachyOS too, for the same reasons, plus I love how much I can tinker with it.

At work a mix of red hat, fedora, centos, and red hawk. At home mint debian spin. It just works and games run great. I don't have time to deal with the red hat crap if i'm not getting paid.

Void because I don't like gnome, primarily because it uses more than 50% of my resources, so I need something lightweight and have had bad experience with arch. I've had some hiccups with void but it wasn't something I couldn't fix. The downside is that it there are no package repository mirrors in my region, and sometimes I have to change mirrors to install packages, and some applications are not packages for void, so I have to look for open source alternatives that I have to compile.

Arch. I need the AUR for certain applications, and the high degree of customizability and opportunity for learning appeal to me as a relatively new-ish Linux user (going on a few years now, most of that time having been on Arch).

NixOS & OpenWRT are my two. NixOS’s Nix language as declarative config is such a great tool for setting up & maintaining a machines for the long-term that despite the initial learning curve has paid off in the long run (Guix or a Nix successor should also be in the same category). OpenWRT is the purpose-built tool it is for having an OS for a router with low overhead & a UI that can be easier to understand the config when networking isn’t something you do on the regular.

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.

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.

Kubuntu 24.04 because it's a solid desktop and I have nothing against Snap. If it works then I don't care if it's a deb flat or snap. p PPAs were fun and exciting but I broke my system more than once with them back 10 years.

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.