Why do you use the distro you use?

I have been using Linux since early March 2020. I chose Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions for two main reasons: stability and my strong familiarity with the APT package manager. The APT man page is deeply ingrained in my memory.
Today I run Debian Stable/Testing and also Unstable, on all my computers 4/4 on Debian!

Finally time to bust this out again.

Debian for everything since it's one of the few distros that has always been there. It's one of the second distros to come after after SLS. Distros come and go, but Debian marches on.
- Most big distros are old enough to drink though. Ubuntu is 20yo, Fedora 21yo, openSUSE 18yo, Arch 23yo, Gentoo 23yo. (I got curious and a bit carried away…)
  But sure, Debian does have them beat by roughly 10 years (31yo).
- Yepp. Started using Debian around the Ham/Slink releases, haven't found any reason to change yet.
  
  Oh wow yeah I started around the same time. 1998 was a magical time. I stated with a boxed copy of OG Suse but switched to Debian like 6 months later then never switched again. I learned a lot from the thick manual that came with Suse but once I tried Debian everything just clicked. It's like you learn the Debian rules and philosophy and any package you work with makes sense.

Arch. Purely because of the Arch Wiki. I honestly think it’s the easiest OS to troubleshoot as long as you are willing and able to read every now and again.
- Agree.
  Years ago, I was troubleshooting something (can't remember what) on Ubuntu and realised the package had fixed the bug, but it wasn't in the repos yet.. like months behind.
  Looked at Arch with it's up to date repos, moved over and never looked back.
  I've reported bugs since, watched the package get updated and seen the improvement on my system... now that's what it should be like.

Bazzite because I get an immutable install that won’t let me accidentally fuck it up. It just works. All necessary drivers for my dock and peripherals are already installed and configured. It’s the very first time in my decades long Linux excursion that I have a user experience that is similar to windows in that sense, but without the enshittifcation of windows.
I genuinely enjoy video editing, gaming, and surfing the web on my laptop when it’s running Bazzite.
- I haven't tried Bazzite yet, but I feel the same about the other ublue flavours.
  I'm the most productive I've ever been. Tweaking everything was fun for a few years, but now I just need a distro I can trust, that comes with the tools to do anything.
  I see rebases to Bazzite DX are available now. I might give that a go today.
  
  I'm loving bluefin and I really want to go all in on the immutable stuff, but I'm having a hard time being productive on it. The devcontainers experience has been miserable (probably because I refuse to use VSCode and every other editor having poor or no support for it); I also had SElinux fuck me up when trying to build some complex dockerfile from a project at work (something that was supposed to just work took me two whole days of debugging - and I even managed to break bluefin's boot process when I tried to mess with the SElinux configuration. This one was mostly due to my own inexperience with SElinux, combined with there being a lot less content on the internet about fixing stuff on immutable distros compared to traditional ones).
  
  Not exactly a product from ublue but something in the same line:
  Secureblue because of the reasons aforementioned for the ublue images where things are really darn rock solid out of the box AND because Linux is fundamentally behind in security and this project is trying to mitigate some of the big flaws.
- Bazite and bluefin for me, too. been daily driving Linux since the mid-90s and this little cluster of distros is the best experience I've had. really feels like everything finally came together.

I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn't like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I'm hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it's a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.
- Everything-in-my-life-as-code FTW
  Besides everything else you said, I especially love how you can store entire bash scripts in the nix configs, and even populate pieces of said scripts with variables if you so desire.
  Also, if you run nixops, it's much easier to work with if your dev system is also running NixOS.
  
  Yeah, i'm realizing more and more how convenient those variables are. I recently started using gtklock for example, a screenlocker that also has separate modules for extra functionality, which are also in nixpkgs, but the problem is that you have to explicitly specify the path to those modules in the config. So i wrote the config inside of home manager, and pointed to the modules path with the pkgs.foo variables. Worked like a charm.
  
  What do you use nixops for?

NixOS. My primary reason for switching was wanting a single list of programs that I had installed. After using ubuntu for 5 years I just lost track of all the tools and versions of software that I had installed...and that didnt even count my laptop. Now all my machines have a single list of applications, and they are all in sync.
- This is a big reason for me. Also because if anything breaks - even if my system becomes unbootable - I can select the previous generation from the boot menu, and everything is back to working.
  It's very empowering, the combination of knowing that I won't irrevocably break things, and that I won't build up cruft from old packages and hand-edited config files. It's given me confidence to tinker more than I did in other distros.
- What does that mean? Like there is one calendar app?
  
  NixOS configuration is done entirely through code, so all of your packages are in a list (although that list can be spread across multiple files; it's a bit to explain)
  I've found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go "oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore"
  I appreciate the way things are configured a lot, but I would not recommend it unless you really like coding and you have time to tinker. It's not too hard to get simple config setup, but I spiraled down a deep rabbit hole really quickly.
  EDIT: If my comment for some reason persuaded you to use NixOS, I recommend you get a basic config setup before installing it. I'd also recommend you look at how annoying it can be to run dynamically-linked applications (i.e. you download a random executable off the Internet and try to run it, or you try to run something you downloaded with npm)
  
  NixOS is a declarative distro. Meaning it you can declare pretty much every aspect of it from what software is installed to how the system is configured from a config file.
  Using your calandar example, you can list Thunderbird (or whatever) as a package you want in the configuration and it will be installed. You can also use that same configuration on another machine and produce the same environment.
  Relevant to the original point, since all your software is listed in a text file, you can easily see exactly what's installed.
  
  Tinkering, really. I did a bunch of stuff with wine and virtualization and troubleshooted across versions. One time I manually updated the version of sqlite in python's std lib to be a newer version. I picked a non LTS kernel once. All these things compounded and bloated my system. And when I went to do clean up, I didnt have a record of exactly everything I installed, what I used and what I didnt. It was guesswork to clean up my disk or even remember the tools I used to get a project working.
  This is solved with declarative configuration, which is the basis of NixOS. I believe VanillaOS 2 has something similar. Likewise, this is one the great benefits of docker, vagrant, ansible, etc.

Fedora because it's boring in the best ways. Curious about NixOS though.

Fedora just werks™
- Haven't used the command line since installing Kinoite, it's... weird.
  
  I use gnome software all the time and since the new update it's so much faster

EndeavourOS because someone said it was Arch for lazy people, and I'm a lazy people.
I did use vanilla Arch before for a while, but just ended up being more work for the same setup with more issues from stuff like missing dependencies I didn't have to worry about with Endeavour.
Only other distro I've used was Pop!_OS when I first tried out Linux.
- Same here: too lazy to fiddle around with stuff. It works, is Arch based, and satisfies my needs

Debian on my servers as a very stable base, Fedora Kionoite on the laptop to try out the concept of atomic distros.

I switched to Arch Linux for the memes, but now am unable to leave it. I've tried a few dozen distros, but none of them are as good as arch for me, I always come back to it. It's like arch is my perfect distro.
- Do you remember any examples of things that made you turn away from those other distros?
  
  Mostly the package manager and even the rolling distros' packages being more outdated than arch everytime. AUR is also very nice to have. The only distro I found that did spike my interest alot was NixOS.

debian is bestian

Debian Stable.
I've used plenty of distros but Debian continues to give me a stable, predictable OS that allows me to get done what I need to get done with no real surprises. I have used it for many years and know how it works very well at this point.
Its my computing equivalent of a comfy and sturdy pair of well worn boots.
- I don't like changes, that's why I like Debian Stable.
- Yeah I daily drive debian stable.
  With flatpaks and docker I never run into problems with my applications being too old or whatever.

I’ve been distro hopping for 15+ years but have settled with Mint for the last few, because I just want something that works. I’m too busy nowadays to bother with maintaining a distro, so I just want something that works out of the box and is easy to maintain. The laptop I use it on is connected to the TV as I use it to watch movies.

Void linux. Both on wayland + labwc desktop and radpberrypi 4 server with multiple dockers, and a bootable usb for my work laptop. Why? Its lightweight, rolling, rock stable, and easily extendable. I love runit for its simplicity. Love xbps package manager for its speed, and love the good and clear documentation.

Fedora Gnome. I like it and it just works for my daily office use. I don't have the time nor the mental strength to fiddle with different distro's on a regular basis.

i been linux only for over 30 years now.
I tend to use Debian stable. At least for the last 15 or so.
The reason is simple. I use it as my main PC and the stability is my main priority.
The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.
But honestly while that was a pain in the past. Now for the vast majority of things I use. I find flat pack or appimage downloads work perfect ally.
The only exception is ham radio software. Here I tend to compile later versions if I need/want them.
Other negatives
I'm really not hugely into gaming. But use blender a lot. Due to this I use Nvidia cards as they are far better supported by blender.
Installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers is a bit of a pain on Debian for newbies. But once you know the process its simple enough. Just not obvious for beginners. The community drivers are still very limited thanks to Nvidia s weird ideas.
- Same, I've been using Debian only for the last 15 or so years. I love the stability, and the old software isn't hard to work around when newer versions are needed.
  I hate the lack of support from Nvidia. I prefer AMD cards though, and they give zero trouble.
  
  Yeah. Unfortunately blender is still noticably faster on Nvidia cards. Due to cuda and optic support.
  I only have a 4060 though. Next time I upgrade, give. How bad the 50s release is. I will look again and compare higher end amd stuff. Likely a few years away though.
- What was you 1st distro back in last millenium?
  
  slackware followed by red hat mothers day 2.0 also used LMDE for several years
- How does the nvidia card fare on linux in general ? on a Wayland session ? I have a 4070Ti running Windows atm, I use Blender professionally and I know it runs the best on Linux because of compiler shenanigans I can't be arsed to understand, but this is one reason I'd like to switch to Linux (...again!). I'm interested to know if you run multiple color-managed monitors by any chance

Fedora strikes a good balance for me. I come from arch and opensuse. I like the stability of fedora, but I like that it also gets updates faster than Debian. Most software I have found has Fedora considerations.
However, I have been using Ubuntu LTS for my self hosted media server.

Slackware: because I'm old and arch is too trendy.
- Geez, I haven’t heard of someone running Slackware in at least 15 years. I mean, I know it’s still around, I just haven’t heard anyone say they were running it.
  
  It's much more... manual than others, I'll admit. For me anymore it's a labor of love.
- 👍🏻 Slackware was my 1st distro. It was before kernel 2.0. Now I use windowslike girly distros..
  
  Let's be honest: nearly all of them now are windowslike girly distros....

Nixos because... I feel like were already loud enough of a crowd everyone should know its benefits lol

Arch. Started using it in high school. Never had a reason to switch. Now I'm just regularly frustrated by other distros trying to make things easier by abstracting simple configurations behind layers of custom scripts.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it has been the most stable and flexible experience I've had that worked out of the box. I have tried a lot of distros over the years, and openSUSE has really held up.
Additionally, I use Nobara for a multi-purpose machine that I also occasionally use for gaming (that's why Nobara instead of openSUSE: it gets me slightly higher %1 lows and is less effort to set up for gaming) and a Void Linux machine for programming. Nobara is pretty good, by far the best gaming oriented distro I've tried, but I do regret that it's Fedora based. Void is really fantastic, but for some reason it only boots on my System76 laptop, so that's the only device I use it on 🤷.
Void is an arch-killer for me; it's faster, has huge repos, and offers a similar experience. I honestly prefer it, and would probably use it on most of my machines if it weren't for the booting issue (it's been a few months since I last tried, so things might have changed though). OpenSUSE is king for low-effort stability and flexibility though.
Well, those are my two cents. Good day y'all!
- What issues did you face on Fedora?

Fedora because it has (IMO) the best vanilla GNOME experience. Every application is in the same theme and looks similar.

I run SteamOS on desktop hardware because I hate windows and it solves almost every Linux gaming problem out of the box...
- Is there an official build for general release, or are you running a steam image built for a handheld?
  
  Yep! It's the SteamOS 3 beta... It's got some bugs and some weirdness to it, but it's not terrible at all
- How?
  
  Steam deck SteamOS iso installer! It's actually surprisingly stable for basic tasks but it is pretty locked down so you can't really break it unless you really try. And it seems to run better if your pairing it with amd cpu/gpu hardware

Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I've ever had to type out.
- How long have you used it and how is it?
  I'm pretty curious about those kinds of distros, and don't really like how nixos is completely hosted on github (and all the drama that constantly comes from the community, and the bad documentation for many things, ...).
  However, guix seems such a niche project that I feel like it can't really be used.
  
  About a year and a half.
  To be honest it's not "easy" to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.
  To use it like any other distro you're going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.
  Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.
  There's also The toybox
  
  Some additional nice things about guix:
  Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.
  Shepherd is hands down the best init program I've ever used. It's just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.
  The OS documentation is built into the distro, with "info guix" you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.

Fedora (workstation) is the first distro I actually managed to daily drive. Its modern, stable, and I didnt have to spend to much time in getting everything to work how I want it. Tried some distros in the past but they never stuck (Ubuntu, mint, popOS).
Curious about arch but I think I will stick Fedora for now.
- I like Debian for the same reason.

Linux Mint is a nice and easy distro that is quite good :D
- I've been using Mint for a year now and I just got a second laptop and the first thing I did was Wipe Windows 11 off of it and install Mint.
  It does everything I need it too.
  
  honestly mint really a very easy distro, I enjoyed using it too. Fedora and other distros also seem pretty cool

NixOS, because:
I can have my entire system be declaratively configured, and not as a yaml soup bolted onto a random distro.
I can trivially separate the OS, and the data (thanks, impermanence)
it has a buttload of packages and integration modules
it is mostly reproducible
All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot /persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.
And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programmung work really well together, amg give me immense power.
- Do you know about guix? Seems right up your alley.
  
  I do, yes. I'd love to use it, because I like Scheme a whole lot more than Nix (I hate Nix, the language), but Guix suffers from a few shortcomings that make it unsuitable for my needs:
  There's no systemd. This is a deal breaker, because I built plenty of stuff on top of systemd, and have no desire to switch to anything else, unless it supports all the things I use systemd for (Shepherd does not).
  There's a lot less packages, and what they have, are usually more out of date than on nixpkgs.
  Being a GNU project, using non-free software is a tad awkward (I can live with this, there isn't much non-free software I use, and the few I do, I can take care of myself).
  Last time I checked, they used an e-mail based patch workflow, and that's not something I'm willing to deal with. Not a big deal, because I don't need to be able to contribute - but it would be nice if I could, if I wanted to. (I don't contribute to nixpkgs either, but due to political reasons, not technical ones - Guix would be the opposite). If they move to Codeberg, or their own forge, this will be a solved issue, though.
  Before I switched from Debian to NixOS, I experimented with Guix for a good few months, and ultimately decided to go with NixOS instead, despite not liking Nix. Guix's shortcomings were just too severe for my use cases.

I use Fedora. No real reason in particular (I do like yum/dnf a lot), I just think it's neat.
I've used Arch in the past as well.

Void for desktop/laptop. These are the things I like about it.
Rolling release
Initial installation is minimal, and doesn't foist a specific DE or other unessential software on me.
No systemd
Nothing similar to Arch's AUR. I know a lot of people love it, but I do not. I mention as the distros are similar.
Debian for my server. But I plan to migrate to Devuan.
Stable and well tested
Huge package selection
Pretty ubiquitously supported. If for whatever reason what you want to run isn't in the repo, .deb packages and apt repos are often available.
Minimal installation available.

I use popos because I own a system 76 and it's what I'm used to.

openSUSE, because of the snapshotting. It's zero-setup and just gives peace of mind when doing upgrades, as I can roll back even from the bootloader.
- Maybe back to EndeavourOS/arch one day but openSUSE gives me less issues.

Debian, on servers and a desktop. I spent a long time using Ubuntu so I'm used to APT and Debian is suitably lightweight for my not amazing hardware. I also like the non rolling nature of it.
- You'd love PopOS then, with its working nature and privacy-focus.
  
  I've tried PopOS as I have a machine with an Nvidia card but every tine I've done the first apt upgrade it nukes grub and won't boot again. Probably something I'm doing wrong and it has been a couple of years since I last tried.

On my main desktop I'm using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.
Linux Mint Cinnamon didn't run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who's implementation of KDE?
I've spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I'd rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I'm not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I've been around long enough to go "Remember PeppermintOS? You don't, okay." So I'm looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.
I've never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I've tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don't know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

Artix (current)
Vanilla as much as possible (same as Arch)
Rolling release (same as Arch)
No systemd (my personal preference)
AUR availability (still an Arch derivative)
Guix (as soon as I have the time)
Similar reason as for Artix
Reproducible builds
Guile
Static configs
- If you're OK with using non-free/libre software I reccomend the systemcrafters install guide
  https://systemcrafters.net/craft-your-system-with-guix/full-system-install/
  
  Read about it some other community, perhaps the guix one, and I was keeping it to help me in the future. It relies on nonguix repo which has its own recipes, but this one is nice. I wish I wouldn't need any binary blobs, but sadly that's not how things work. Counting on risc-v not just getting competitive hardware, but also motivating the surrounding hardware to follow.
  I'll definitely need it in order to use relatively modern hardware.
  Many thanks !

Arch: I have the most up to date computer in the whole world, I have the AUR, no one can stop me
switches to Debian
Debian: My packages are so stable, nothing can break the eternal peace of my system's packages
switches back to Arch
- I have Debian on a laptop that I don't use that much, and I use Nix package manager for managing the apps I use.
  Running Arch was a nightmare, as I was updating once every 1-2 months and I was getting lots of conflicts.
  
  I update daily and never had issues with packages.

Mint cuz I'm a newbie and it was recommended.
I tried KDE Neon Plasma a while too and it was doing a weird stuttery jitter thing with the mouse that I didn't like so I switched back.
Mint just hasn't had any huge frustrating problems or anything wrong with it that I couldn't fix in the settings menu. Just how I like it.
- Have you done any desktop customisation? Mint can look as slick as KDE with a few tweaks.

Because despite all the people telling me I'm wrong, Kubuntu is still by far the best distro I've ever used. Rock solid, super fast, and continues to improve.
- I always unable to upgrade ubuntu based distros. I always need to reinstall
  
  The only reason my last machine didn't get more than 10 years worth of in-place upgrades was because I decommissioned it as a desktop and turned it into a server, so I wiped it at that point.

Fedora. Reason is probably that im used to it now. But if I have to make some points why then there they are:
nice balance between being up-to-date and not bleeding edge
new technologies. Fedora always pushes new technologies first such as wayland, pipewire, systemd... I like it. I dont have to wait 2 years until x distro rolls it. I get it now, sometimes with some problems but nothing that i couldnt manage.
When im trying out some software or building from source the documentation often includes specific steps for fedora (among debian, ubuntu and arch). Its really nice to not be a niche distro and get instructions tailored for fedora. Also some pre build packages are often in deb and rpm. -im used to dnf and its few handy commands like dnf history etc. Im sure that other package managers offer similar solutions but i know dnf and it feels like home

Bazzite because never breaks.
- I'm using it as my main gaming distro now but I still have it break sometimes. Mostly due to Bluetooth stuff, but I also need to shut down the pc completely whenever I leave it running on its own for a while because it just doesn't wake back up if it sleeps - and I always forget to look into that after turning it back on.
- I actually had it break, it wouldn't go past the login after an update. Turns out it was a gnome issue. It was something like an accessibility feature I had enabled crashed gnome. So, technically it was gnome and it would've happened in any distro.
  Other than that, bazzite, its perfect.

EndeavourOS because of the AUR

I use Mint. I had a phase with different distros, but when I had my son, and he turned 3, I installed Linux Mint for him. Little by little, I started using it myself. Today my son is in the military service and I still use Mint.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Recently I bought cheap Surface-like x86 tablet on a rather recent hardware, and running Debian and its cousins required more tinkering than I was willing to do, so I decided to go with a more modern rolling release. Tried Arch for a few months, bricked it from mixing stable and testing branches, tried Fedora, and finally settled in Tumbleweed. I like it for being on the bleeding edge and exceptionally stable at the same time, perhaps thanks to robust OpenSUSE Build Service automated testing. And it is from a European company, that can't hurt.

Fedora. I've been using it since Fedora Core 1 and was mostly RedHat before that. I don't have time to muck around with my desktop and Fedora almost always just works. I've had too many problems with Ubuntu and Suse and friends. And while I like Arch and Debian and others, I just want my desktop to be point and click. My days off tinkering on my desktop are long gone. Kids, house, work, wife, grandkids, other hobbies keep me busy. I save tinkering for my selfhosting adventures.

Mine may be the funniest
I used to always recommend people use Linux Mint as their first distro, but then it hit me, how can I recommend something I only installed for five minutes? So I got myself Linux Mint, it was 21.3 Virginia at that time, now I have more important things to do in my system and it has stayed.
I used Arch in my old laptop for 2 and half years, learned alot of things from Arch, also got to know some people in the Arch unofficial Matrix Room. But I have a new laptop and this is the story.

I recently moved to Fedora KDE Plasma after years on W10, simply because I don't want to use W11 and its AI bullshit. So far, it's been a great time, and I haven't noticed any major performance issues, so I'm happy with it. Having to update everything every few days is pretty novel though, and 'sudo dnf update -y' makes me feel like Hackerman, king of all Hackers. I think I like the customization options most though. I get way more control over what happens on my PC than W10 ever gave me, and it's all wrapped in a very user-friendly GUI. Overall 8.5-9/10.
- yay I want to install Fedora Plasma when I get a new drive, see if I can gradually switch (for real this time)... Plasma has a new pen tablet utility for Wayland, and since I use my tablet exclusively... when my Windows 10 is EOL I will switch for sure. Good to know it runs well for you
  
  Yeah, I also use a pen tablet for some stuff, and it handles it decently well. One issue I've run into with it is that if I turn my monitor off while the tablet is plugged in, there's like a 50/50 chance the monitor won't load video unless I turn the tablet on too. It's funky. Otherwise, getting my RTX4070 up and running wasn't too hard. It's a good distro for idiots (me).

The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.
That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.
I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.
For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.

Mint. Just because it works with zero issues on the desktop. Everything else is either Rocky, RH or Debian.

I used the big ones, ubuntu, arch, opensuse and (atomic) fedora. Fedora had the nicest out of box experience. Morover, I moved to podman, systemd, selinux, etc. And the atomic version showed me a new workflow with flatpak and distrobox (nowadays, I use nix oftentimes).
The best part about it is that I do not care about the system anymore. I do not even interact with it. I don't install packages (besides the base layer and minimal modifications that are long lasting like installing openssl for GNOME iirc)
I use mainly flatpaks, if I need aur, I fire up distrobox, or use nix if I want to. And the best part is, I'd have the exact same workflow even without the atomic version. Even on another distro. I do not interact with it much.
Moreover, I am happy with all the choices fedora made with the base package and images. I do not have to do an informed choice like on arch. It just updates whenever I boot my pc. I do not need to read updates, they are just there, somewhere. I do not need to disable snaps or work around weird choices. I just start firefox, vscodium, a terminal and do whatever I want to do.
Edit: I actually wanted to switch back to opensuse just to support it but I guess I'd rather move to nix some day. Maybe with niri and cosmic.
- This is pretty much explains why I've been digging bluefin lately.

Debian because it's what I picked when I started, and switching sounds annoying
- When i first researched Linux distros and learned that Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, etc were all derivatives of Debian I knew it was the distro I wanted to learn.
  Granted the package manager does tend to fall behind and the Linux kernel is quite outdated on Debian 12 however, it works great for 99% of tasks (including gaming!).

EndeavourOS on my laptop and Ubuntu on my home server. Still new to linux thought endeavour was a good choice to really get my feet wet with lessening the chance to screw things up too badly. Ubuntu because it looks like it just works.

SteamOS: because it came with my Steam Deck.
LinuxMint: because it is an Ubuntu-derivative and widely used which makes finding solutions and packages easier and I like MATE.

Fedora Silverblue because I seem to break any system I have eventually, and this one’s still going.

My main reason to use arch is the exceptionnally complete and useful arch wiki. Though many pages are useful for other distros as well. With the archlinux and package install guides, it's just a matter of time (and study!) until you know how to get around.

Artix (current)

Guix (as soon as I have the time)