Linux

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

Void Linux

The name is really cool

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.

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 scrolled this far and no slackware?

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.

Nobara because I want to game on my PC headache free

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This has been beaten to the ground.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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

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 still have yet to see someone mention Hanna Montana Linux.

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.

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.