I use Ubuntu because it's the most popular and well-supported.

I'm going to be switching to Mint at some point because it's basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don't trust Canonical anymore, but it's hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I've been using Ubuntu since 2017.

I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I'm going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.

I use LMDE. I use it because Mint has proved that it is worth using (for example: it provide easy way to install multimedia codec by only click "Install Multimedia Codec" in applications menu) and I want it to success.

Sorry if my english is bad

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.

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

• 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

Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it's easy.

I've been using Bazzite for a few months now (switched from EndeavourOS, which was great) and it's been amazing. I'm sold on atomic/immutable. I have never had a PC this stable, including every Windows PC I've had.

And it's perfect for gaming. There are weird little tweaks and settings that I had to do on EOS to get my GPU working correctly, etc., and they all just work out of the box in Bazzite (I did get the iso image made specifically for my laptop, which definitely helps). It's super impressive actually.

And distrobox (BoxBuddy comes installed) can be used to access the AUR or whatever if I feel the need to. Just fire up an Arch box, and have at it.

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.

Linux sub, post with 40 comments under 1 hour

Is this the year...

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

Fedora KDE.

I was happily using Windows 10 until a few months ago, but needed to build a new PC. I got a glimpse of Windows 11 on a friend's laptop and didn't like it. So I asked my Linux-friend which distribution he would recommend to someone who wants to try Linux, but doesn't want to stray too far away from the windows look and feel.

I use Arch with Hyprland because it's great.

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.

Devuan because I don't like systemd

Because the logo is cool :)

Mint for my desktop system. It just does exactly what I want it to, has good compatibility with software and Cinnamon is my DE of choice.

NixOS for my server, because being able to use one config repo and format for everything is so nice.

I use NixOS for my desktop because ~~I hate myself~~ you can configure everything without needing to edit a bunch of different config files that use different configuration languages.

I use Arch btw for my Minecraft server because I am crazy.

Mint on my ancient MacBook because I didn’t really know any better and it’s working just nice for me, and Asahi/Fedora on my M1 mini, because it’s the only option.

Mint, because it seems like the easiest OS for someone who doesn't know wtf a flatpak is

The other hard drive has Windows, because Fusion360 doesn't work on Linux. Hey Autodesk, can you hear me? Make it happen please

I'm currently using bazzite due to its really solid out of the box support for gaming hardware and peripherals.

I'm really surprised everyone uses arch. I have three theories as to why:

1. There actually aren't that many arch uses but when arch users have the opportunity they won't hesitate to say "BTW I use arch" were as others don't really bother.
2. There are lots of arch users and everyone uses it because they want to be able to say "BTW I use arch"
3. (Very unlikly) There are lots of arch users and it's because it's actually a good distro that people like.

(This is mostly a joke jsyk I'm sure arch is a great distro)

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.

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

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.

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

Xubuntu. Convenience of ubuntu, less cluttered UI.

Debian Testing (laptop, workstation and RPIs) since it works best for me. Tried Gentoo, Arch, OpenSUSE and several others. Also, I've been using FreeBSD for some time.

LMDE. It really does just work.

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

I used to use Arch btw.

Now I am on Nix, I just love shell.nix files. I haven't spent much time on my configs yet, but once I finish them, they'll be super easy to set up again, thats cool.

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.

MX Linux. It is Debian with setup and tools I really want but would be too lazy to prepare in one go. Love it as much as I love Debian.