What distro do you use and why?

For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.

For my gaming PC, I've got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I'd either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I'd just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I'm doing on there

openSUSE Tumbleweed. I've tried switching to Aurora and Bazzite, but ended up using openSUSE again and now I love it even more.

EDIT: Typos.

EDIT 2: I also love tinkering with Void and Alpine on VMs.

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.

Debian and Linux Mint.

Debian for mission critical stuff like servers or things I don't want to futz with, like HTPCs, work machines, etc.

Mint for my gaming desktop because it's a bit newer on kernels and such.

from the comments, there's a split between

linux as a tool: debian, mint, fedora, opensuse, etc.
linux as a toy: arch, gentoo, nixos, etc.

i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it's not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want

Debian Testing. It isn't "recommended" but it works fine.

Obviously if you want AUR you need an Arch variant, in which case just pick Arch.

Edit: I needed the why, it's up to date enough for me and I know apt well.

Plain old Fedora.

I know the hurdles, i know what to expect, and I've never been surprised by it.

Immutable sounds nice, AUR sounds nice, NixOS sounds nice, but i am utterly confident in my current choice's reliability and comfortable with its idiosyncracies. Everything i want to do works very well.

If i had less time/energy or had to switch, Kubuntu would be my second choice. Less frequent updates and fewer creature comforts, but also very reliable.

I'm in the same boat. I was a kde neon person for a very long time, but I eventually got tired of some weird issues I was having that I couldn't find a fix for. tried fedora on a bit of a whim and everything just worked. Nvidia drivers were a breeze to set up, gnome is very nice out of the box and doesn't take the configuring I'm used to on kde, and even just having gnome boxes pre installed is super useful and I get to skip the virtualboxes setup. very impressed with it overall. never going back

Fedora Kinoite. I like KDE, atomic distros and the fact that Fedora is the only (at the least that I know of) distro that has proper SELinux implementation.

I also play games on this system, so having newer kernel and Mesa versions also help.

Bazzite, I want my PC to just work and not require me to maintain it, on top of that I need it to be game-ready and have good color management for work related stuff.

NixOS because it's the only usable stab at sustainable system configuration.

EndeavourOS. It's just easy to install and I basically use it like Arch

Fedora Silverblue. It does what I need so I can get on with my life.

I recently installed OpenSuse, I have been using FreeBSD mostly, but have used linux through the years. I decided to go with an rpm based distro and I've always likes the chameleon mascot of Suse. I'm used to Debian based linux, so it's been a slight adjustment but it's been nice and smooth. I'm running Tumbleweed right now and all my Steam games work, as well as my 3d Windows applications via wine. It just works* I am too old and tired to spend time tweaking anymore.

Mint pleb on desktop because it's stable and just works, bazzite on steam deck for installing my own games.

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.

I use Arch with Hyprland because it's great.

Ubuntu because I'm old, uncool, and tired

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.

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.

No Void here?

Oh well... I surely don't use it because it's popular...

Runit
Pkg manager
KISS
Up to date / rolling distro
But stable

I went into void as my first DIY distro, mainly because I wanted to mess around with window managers and it was a very good experience. Runit made my underpowered laptop boot into linux in like 4 seconds, crazy fast. XBPS package manager was always really really fast too. I like the fact that nearly everything you need is in the official repo, instead of having to delve into the depths of something like the AUR. I also managed to make a contribution to the repos with the help of the community on the IRC chat rooms which were very noob friendly. Overall just a solid experience.

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.

Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I've used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I'm comfortable with it and it's supported in every cloud environment I've touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)

I've got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I'd go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don't find much of a difference beyond package management.

Fedora Silverblue

I like Gnome
I like that Fedora adopts new technology quickly
I like how it makes updates more reliable
I like flatpak

I use the Bluefin flavor of Silverblue. I like not having to tinker with my laptop to keep it working, everything happens in the background.
Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.

Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.
I like flatpak

i am kinda the opposite of you, i find flatpacks meh its alright.
- I love flatpak. No more dependency hell!

NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.

EndeavorOS. Because I wanted to have a rolling release distribution that is always up to date, and one that is good supported by maintainers and community. Good documentation is very important to me. And I trust the team behind EndeavorOS and Archlinux.

Also the manual approach of many things and the package manager based on Archlinux is very nice. I also like the building of custom packages that is then installed with the package manager (basically my own AUR package). The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.

The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.

Prob the reason why i hated garauda (Idk if is it because i picked the dragonized gaming ver)
- Probably. I'm definitely not a fan of Garuda Linux (never used it to be honest). The styling and the bloat are not my taste. But the most important thing to me is, if I can trust those developers and maintainers? And I don't trust most non common distros. Looking at their webpage, they also have a KDE lite version with less bloat and bare minimum packages to get started. This is actually awesome!

Linux Mint, because I don't like to tinker with the system, I like good defaults (and Mints has them).

Yk what I LOVE THAT, Why i liked linux mint when i was new.
Well technically Mint has one terrible default nowadays that is hidden unverified Flatpaks.

Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.

Debian on most my machines. Can’t trust commercially backed distros any more. I’m tired of chacing cutting edge stuff. Like things to just work.

After quite a bit of agonizing, I eventually landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I chose a rolling release distro because on my desktop I want to be up-to-date. Having used Gentoo a long time ago, I didn't want a distro that takes effort to install and set up. openSUSE is somewhat popular with an active community and decent documentation in case I run in to issues. I also considered the fact it's based in Germany, because EU has at least some decent privacy laws. I was put off by the fact its backed by SUSE, but that's a two-edged sword.

Right now I'm content with Tumbleweed, but I'm keeping an eye on OpenMandriva Lx if I feel like switching.

I wish it was not hard getting nvidia drivers on opensuse.
- i see people saying that, but the process was almost automatic to me. what issues are you having?

Arch because it helped me understand the os better and i like tinkering. Also pacman and the aur

Also pacman and the aur

Another reason why am using cachyos

I have Bazzite on a laptop for the ease of use and general resistance to breakage, and Spiral Linux in a VM. The latter works flawlessly that way, like it was always meant to be in a VM.

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.

Debian + Xfce on the desktop, because it (mostly, see below) just works, it's snappy, reliable, and I don't need my apps being constantly updated (I have very simple needs and use cases)
Mint + Cinnamon on the laptop, because it's still debian-based and because unlike Debian, Mint was able to connect my AirPods out of the box and I use them a lot when on the laptop... I also quickly learned to appreciate Cinnamon, I must say.

edit: typos

I wonder what you will think of lmde its linux mint with a debian base instead of ubuntu (It keeps some stuff for eg the desktop updated).
- I've seen lmde mentioned on Mint website but if I recall correctly they also presented it like a somewhat experimental version?
- LMDE is snappy as hell and stable as a rock

Arch. I had some tinkering with other distros in the past but wanted to configure pretty much everything. Running it with Cinnamon. I love pacman and AUR and have been able to not break it so far after a year of being installed which is a new record for me 😂

NixOS for most things, Debian on some servers as a docker host

Interesting. I’ve using NixOS many years on servers but recently also started using it as a base for docker hosts. Before that I used Ubuntu or Debian for docker hosts, but I figured out I still like the declarative approach even for simple servers like docker hosts. There’s your basic security config, ssh keys and monitoring setup that I used to do imperatively, but I much rather have declaratively now, no matter how small. And enabling docker on NixOS is just a virtualisation.docker.enable = true; anyway.
- Oh I know it's better, problem is I host some stuff my friend group relies on so I don't want downtime while I figure things out. Also, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to get NixOS set up on a VPS without native support (I'm on Hetzner and I know it's possible, it's just a bit of a hassle). It's one of those projects that I'll get to eventually, when I got time. Or so I tell myself
I recently started using compose2nix, and I'm enjoying it.

https://github.com/aksiksi/compose2nix

I use NixOS, Gentoo, and Debian:

NixOS because I like declarative configuration files.
Gentoo because I enjoy compiling from source.
Debian because the other two are more difficult to use.

Technically NixOS is all compiled from source too (if you disable the binary caches). It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head. Debian still holds a special place in my heart too, for its simplicity and stability!
- I do this with my kernel & a couple of applications that either compile super fast anyhow or at runtime benefit from further compiler optimizations.
- It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head.
  
  I wouldn't say so. We currently don't hold a candle to USE-flags. Many packages are already configurable but there's no standard on anything w.r.t. that.
  
  There's no technical reason we couldn't have such a standard but it hasn't happened yet.

PopOS but I'd like to switch to NixOS

Try it! Here’s a proof of concept that I’ve made that shows NixOS could even be used as a base for a very simple OS that abstracts the Nix away almost completely. Maybe the source code is of interest to you.

https://github.com/nixup-io/desk-os
- I need a way to backup my files between the two OS to do the move. I will look at your repo

I use Fedora simply because I got a Framework and the fingerprint reader didn’t work in (K)Ubuntu so I tried Fedora as a little test. It worked, so I just stuck with it - everything else worked as I wanted, and it gave me the opportunity to try a completely new distribution.

Fedora, it has KDE spin and quite recent packages.

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

Yeah i kinda like it lets you install desktops that is in arch repos, well because its arch based.

Fedora.

Most of the others either booted to a black screen after install, or the track pad was somewhat uncontrollable when scrolling. Older Asus laptop with separate GPU.

I use EndeavourOS Xfce because it's Arch with pacman and not Flathub or Snap. Plus, I love the simplicity and the performance boost you get with Xfce (even if it's a small boost with a modern gaming PC).

yo finally someone who loves native packages more then flatpack.
- Flatpak has its benefits, but there are tradeoffs as well. I think it makes a lot of sense for proprietary software.
  
  For everything else I do prefer native packages since they have fewer issues with interop. The space efficiency isn't even that important to me; even if space issues should arise, those are relatively easy to work around. But if your password manager can't talk to your browser because the security model has no solution for safe arbitrary IPC, you're SOL.
- Flatpak annoys me

Ubuntu for my servers, and Linux Mint for my Workstation.

I grew up using Debian-based distros, so it's what I'm comfortable with. I like how Mint seems to "just work" most of the time, especially with samba shares and usb peripherals.

Ubuntu server is primarily because it's incredibly easy to get support when you need it.

Linux sub, post with 40 comments under 1 hour

Is this the year...

Damn, not a single pop-os enjoyer here?!

I tried PopOS on my laptop but found it fucky so I tried Fedora KDE and it works. Too many steps Debian -> Ubuntu -> PopOS.

CachyOS. I use it because I am a fan of Arch based systems, rolling releases etc, but CachyOS is optimised for my generation of hardware, and has lots of good default configurations for various apps. They have a customised proton version, a good default fish profile etc.

tl;dr It's Arch, but optimised, and slightly more pre-configured out of the box.

Garuda for me. The reasons are similar; just replace some optimization with some convenience. It's a bit garish by default but pleasant to use.
Same thing.

@Mwa

A fuck link - "You have to locked in"

What do you share here???

Huh????
- It's spam

Devuan because I don't like systemd

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.

Debian stable (w/ XFCE). No-nonsense, excellent community support, well-documented, low-maintenance, and runs on anything so I can expect things to work the same way across all of my machines, old, new(ish), or virtual
Just flexible enough that I can customize it to my taste but not so open-ended that I have to agonize over every last config
It's been around for many years and will be around for many more
I often entertain the idea of moving to Alpine or even BSD, but I can't resist the software selection available on Debian

Xubuntu. Convenience of ubuntu, less cluttered UI.

I like Manjaro

I like it
Its user friendly if you don't want to spend a month fiddling with it
Feels comfy and relatively lightweight

If you are living on the edge of latest and greatest versions, it can be a pain to wait for official repos to be updated. Though I only noticed this problem with Discord desktop app, however since I realised that it spies on every process that runs and you cannot turn that feature off. Uninstalled. Problem gone. Happy me.