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The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.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.

Slackware: because I’m old and arch is too trendy.

I was running only arch on my surface pro 7 and my amd desktop, then last week after an update it seemed gnome and Linux surface kernel weren’t playing nice and had bricked the install. I have switch the laptop to Debian but I tend to stick with arch, like op as I am used to it, I now run Debian as it is known to be stable.

I would love to find a new distro but for me its the sunk cost fallacy, I have put so much time into learning arch and to repeat all that - this new distro would need to offer something wildly different.

My gaming rig is on arch because i need the aur. I use my gaming rig for a bit of development too, dependencies are super easy on arch.

All my laptops, work and personal, run fedora kde because its rock solid and has the best “just works” features while still being a technical distro.

My servers are either alpine because its lightweight and easy to harden, debian for the stability and minimalism. I do have a few arch servers, but those are for testing and they get spun up, do the work they need and then killed.

DietPi for my raspberry because its debian based and has a plethora of automations to do what ever you like with your raspberry. Works on desktop too, well.

Lastly, mint, on my surface pro 5, because it is my obe device that is meant to just browse and be a portal into the internet or to play some movie or something while we are out for vacations or stuff like that.

There are many other distros that I like and use, but I use these the most. I love how each linux distro has its stregths and weaknesses, each their own usecase, you get to finetune what you need to make your life easier.

I installed Manjaro about six months ago because I’d never tried it. I like it so far and it has yet to get in my way enough to make me want to change.

• 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.

Pop OS. Don’t use much of its custom features since I have installed sway on top of it and did some custom edits, was thinking of switching to another distro but they announced COSMIC, which looks very cool. Why not stick with the distro that could have the best experience with it?

Nobara: Has all the gaming features I want on my gaming pc (like gamescope) and is htpc capable. Also, it’s based on Fedora, which I’m familiar with.

Fedora: I like gnome and it’s always fairly up to date and rock solid. Great on my laptop.

Have considered switching to openSUSE though. It’s German (as am I), it’s the first Linux distro I ever used (on my granddad’s PC, more than a decade ago) and I’ve heard a lot of good about tumbleweed.

Fedora because it just works and I don’t have to mess with it.

Steam OS on Steam Deck. Fedora on Framework13 cause reliability. Garuda Mokka on Framework16 cause pretty and it just works.

May move from Garuda back to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed or CachyOS at some point.

Bazzite, Aurora, Proxmox and Ubuntu Server.

@aleq

I’m using #endeavouros with Gnome on my Desktop at the moment, just because I wanted to try Arch with all the priorly mentioned arguments, rolling release, Wiki and so on.

I started with Slackware in the early 90s, SuSE and Red Hat (Fedora today) just for fun and self-education, even though Slackware wasn’t fun at all. This distro brought me nights without sleep and full of tears. 😂🫣

I tried a couple of times to switch to Linux on the desktop but never got it to work satisfyingly like Windows with all my private and business applications and games.
So Linux and I had an on and off relationship over decades. I wanted to love Linux so badly, but it was never reasonable to run it on the desktop.
Let’s see how we’re going to end, Arch/Endeavour and me.

On a server I would not switch from a Debian-based distro, just because I’m used to it and I would also prefer stable instead of rolling releases.

EndeavourOS because of the AUR

Because it’s not Windows. So fed up with it. Used Debian. But as of late gotten annoyed with them and everything seems to lead me towards Arch. Dunno. We’ll see. Just a bit scary to switch as I’m used with apt and not Pacman or whatever it’s called :P Need to learn to make backup on the system in case something breaks etc