Free and Open Source Software

Debian is mine and has been for decades + I’m a little bit happy to see it’s still well represented / well thought of in the community. Everything works, and you can choose new + exciting with headaches sometimes, or old + stable with no headaches but old.

Only real issue is the package management hasn’t kept pace with node / python / go / everything else wanting to do its own little mini package management, and so very occasionally that side is a little bit of a mess

NixOS I would like to try at some point as the core philosophy seems a little more suited to the modern (Docker / pip / etc) era, but I never messed with it

Mint 21.3 as my main Desktop OS - almost zero complaints after over a year. Everything just works.

Ubuntu using Linux-Surface on my old Surface Pro. Breathed new life into a device I had abandoned (after all 8gb of ram isn’t enough for Windows malware these days). Gnome works really nice on a touchscreen two-in-one. Kudos to the Linux-Surface folks. They took one of the few positive developments from Microsoft (Surface hardware) and made it possible to remove the worst part (windows). Not that I’ll ever buy a Surface again. It also allowed me to retire my iPad.

Fedora Linux on a cheap Dell laptop as my media client. Fedora is nice and runs well, haven’t done too much with it other than Firefox and Calibre. Nice to see a different ‘branch’ in action.

I’m pretty basic and generally lazy so I don’t delve into some of the smaller distros or distro hop. Maybe later I’ll do it with VMs, but eh not sure it’s my kind of hobby. Too many other things to do.

Best of luck and let us know how it goes.

I'm on Debian Stable (with a few backported packages) for both work and gaming. It's not the most beginner-friendly distro, but I'm no beginner, and I love how low-maintenance it is. It just keeps on working.

I would like to try Qubes OS eventually. I don't think it will be ready for gaming any time soon, but for privacy and security-minded isolation of components, I expect it's tough to beat.

Linux mint it just works.

Opensuse because I like green.

Debian

I've tried different distros and liked them, but tend to come back to Debian.

Debian! It's stable, elegant, and doesn't impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.

I'd be interested to try VanillaOS or another "immutable" distro at some point in the future. See if they've matured enough for my day-to-day use.

Endeavour and KDE.
Like the look of it. Easy to update, no bloatware or games reinstalled.
If I do swap again it'd probably be back to Mint. I had some issues a while ago and moved to MX. That worked well but there was so much guff. Tried Endeavour about a year ago and have been here ever since.

Currently running Garuda for gaming and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for everything else. Very much look forward to combining them in my own Arch/Void install when I get my new laptop.

Manjaro

Easy to use and you can still legally say "I use Arch btw"

I'm currently on Arch, but my first distro was Linux Mint. Linux Mint eased my transition into the Linux world, as it looked and behaved almost the same as Windows. You can avoid terminal commands completely thanks to the GUI apps that the Mint team includes for updating, installing, and removing packages.

I switched to Arch because one of the benefits of Arch is that it forces you to become familiar with the various different components that make up a Linux distro. When you install Mint, pretty much everything is included out of the box. You may have to install a few proprietary drivers here and there, depending on your HW config, but overall, you get everything you need to start using your computer. You don't have to concern yourself with a lot of things. Arch is different. Even with the archinstall command that you can use to simplify the installation process, you still have much to do post-install. Audio drivers, package manager, Bluetooth, productivity apps, customization options, WiFi drivers, to name a few. And even after that, when you start daily driving Arch, you still may encounter issues that would require you to do some troubleshooting via reading the Arch Wiki or looking for similar problems on Arch forums. It can be a headache at times, but I personally feel it's worth it.

Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite's the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.

My current distro is NixOS - mainly as I've built my NAS/homelab. Definitely not recommended for a new player to Linux!

Antix! It has a couple of rough patches but overall I really like it. Mainly I like having my RAM back

Debian on my servers, LMDE on my laptops.

Bazzite Linux running KDE Plasma 6. It's a wonderful distro based on Fedora 40 (I think, still kinda new) and it's made for gaming.

Qubes

Try Debian + KDE. It's a good combo imo - both stability and modernity.

Finally, my chance to say...

I use Arch, by the way :D

...Also, I tried Ubuntu and Mint and Fedora and some others (ages ago). Didn't like feeling like everything I wanted to do was stepping on the toes of some software that was trying to manage it for me, but not how I wanted or I just didn't want it managed for me.

I tend to alternate between Arch and Gentoo every few years. Sometimes Arch feels like it's making assumptions and doing things its way more than I want, but then Gentoo takes ages to install or update anything, is a bit more fiddly. I'll probably go back or maybe try out Funtoo again but for now I don't have a CPU that won't melt if I try to compile things (laptop-only booooo v.v!!) sooo Arch for now. :3 🤷

Mint on a couple of old laptops. Debian command line on a hobby server. Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi.

Didn’t love Arch (too complicated for my skills at the time). Fedora was okay and would do in a pinch. I remember liking OpenSUSE, but went back to Mint for some reason that I don’t remember (probably driver- or repo-related).

I’ll likely never try it myself, but I’ve known new users who did ok with Zorin.

I'm currently using Kubuntu, although I'm planning on switching to Debian or maybe NixOS at some point. Kubuntu works, but I don't like snaps, and even though I've removed them I'd rather just not ever have to deal with them.

I first started with Mint, but didn't like gnome/cinnamon which is why I switched to Kubuntu, but other than that it was fine.

I'm currently on Neon on the desktop (and macOS on the mac). On the servers it nearly all debian and a couple of BSDs

Over the last almost 25 years i've almost exclusively ran KDE when not being stuck with windows (for various reasons). Ive heard good things about Arch, but I'm getting far too old to be bothered with a semi-complex install (yes I have run Gentoo for several years, so I think it is an age thing).

I use EndeavourOS because I like having access to the AUR but didn't want to risk messing up my Windows installation by trying to manually set up Arch for dual booting (this was before archinstall was made). I like it, and I like using KDE. My only complaint with it would be that pacman kinda shits itself if you go too long without updating.

The first distro I ever used was ZorinOS back in like 2017.

I'm on MX Linux

My first distrobution was the good old Ubuntu for a laptop that I used for school. I stuck with that for 2-3 years. During that time I really, really wanted to try out new distros, but I didn't want to lose my files and such, so I just stuck with it. During this time I also changed my desktop's os to Ubuntu, but I am not sure when I did it.

After I got a Laptop due to the previous being old and broken, I tried out Arch Linux and grew to love it more than Ubuntu, so I changed out my desktop's os to that as well when I got a new ssd and was migrating to it. I used Arch for another year or two, before my laptop had a disk failure and I had to reinstall. I installed Debian onto it, since I was feeling lazy and didn't want to go through the mess of installing Arch again. And then later I also installed Windows on it with dualboot for games that didn't want to work with Proton.

So basically I now use Arch on the desktop and Debian/Windows on laptop.

I'm on Pop_OS and really like it. I chose it because i have a 2080, so the nvidia specific package is great for me. No WiFi issues, but I almost always have it hard wired, so not much chance to have it go wrong

What distro I'm using isn't that helpful of a question because it's largely a matter of taste and technical needs. I use Arch in large part because I do some rather exotic things that would be harder to set up on most mainstream distros whereas Arch just gives me a completely blank slate to work with and configure my system the exact way I want it to work. My desktop also has some server duties, it runs VMs, it has multiple GPUs and also drives my TV room independently of my main workstation area.

I usually recommend whichever distro gets you the closest to having everything the way you like out of the box as a starting point just because it's less frustrating when most things works out of the box. The Arch experience is nothing works out of the box because it doesn't even come with a box. Arch isn't necessarily a bad choice even for beginners, but the learning curve is much steeper as a result and some people do like to just learn everything whereas some others prefer to start with the shallow part of the pool rather than diving it headfirst. It's not like you have to commit to any distribution forever, you can start with something simple to use, learn your way around Linux and then you can upgrade to another distribution as your needs and wants evolves.

Debian, Mint, Arch (by the way).

Had Ubuntu as my main driver for about 2 years but didn't like Gnome and had more trouble with an Nvidia card than on Mint or Arch.

Fedora is top of my to-try-list but I'm not a distro-hopper, so who knows when I'll have a use case.

Hannah Montana Linux

Happily running EndeavourOS with KDE for like 3 years without reinstall.

I have a few machines, which run:

• Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) with IceWM - Raspbian is the only desktop RPi distro that works out-of-the-box. I chose IceWM because it's fast, light, customisable, and I can make it look like it's 2004.
• openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce+Bspwm - I keep going back to openSUSE. It just works. As for the desktop, I wanted Xfce but with tiling.
• Mageia 9 with LXQt - I just needed something lighter than Fedora Xfce, as this machine only has 4GB of RAM.
• FreeBSD with i3 - Thought I'd give BSD a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
• Gentoo (WIP) - I'm just throwing random distros at my MacBook until something sticks. Gentoo is fast and can control the fan without me having to git clone and compile the drivers (ironically).
• crunchbang++ (i386) with Openbox - This is a mid-2000s MacBook, running one of the few Linux distros that actually boots on it.

Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.

Sone distros I'd like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.

The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it's often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can't trust at the moment.

I used to be on pure Arch for 2.5 years, but currently uses cachyOS. And its so much removes the pain points of arch, as well as giving super fast performance.

SteamOS on steam deck, PostmarketOS on pinephone. On desktop I use OpenBSD, but if I used a Linux it'd be either Alpine, Void, or Devuan.

I am using CentOS 9 in WSL. I don't particularly care what distribution I use because I mostly using a bash shell as a software development environment. I prefer apt to flat packs and use ubuntu 20 on an embedded system that I write code for at work. I keep wanting to get more experience with KDE and gnome, but I haven't been good about using my free time to mess with OS. As long as I have vim and a prompt that uses vi input, I am pretty content. (Does this make me sound old? The kids at work have trouble following what I am doing when we pair program.)

If you like or need the latest software, use a rolling distro. I use Manjaro (boo, hiss) and really like it. But if you don't want the Arch users to beat you up and pants you, I hear Endeavour OS is pretty good.

NixOS on my Laptop, Desktop, Gaming Machine, and around 10 servers.

Still have two servers on Arch, waiting to be migrated, and I'm really itching to but NixOS on the Steam Deck as well.

Debian stable on Thinkpad 1 and Debian testing on Thinkpad 2. Testing is nice because Gnome is a slightly better version. Stable is nice because it doesn't bother me about updates.

What don't you like about gnome?