EndeavourOS (it’s basically arch btw)

Arch btw, beside the meme it really covers everything I want for my daily driver to do, and I love having all the latest software instead of waiting until it gets added to the official repositories or adding them manually.

If I were to use Linux for professional working though, I would explore Fedora just to have a system that is more stable and can't cause weird technical issues taking up time from my work.

For servers Debian without even thinking about it

Debian

arch btw

I've been on Kubuntu for a few years. I'm considering moving to something non-Ubuntu, but I'm really happy with KDE Plasma.

Fedora server on my server, custom blue build image on my laptop based on Gnome secureblue

Mint.

It just works, I don't have to think about my OS.

Mint out of simplicity and ease of use because I've still got my training wheels on.

Will use Bazzite soon as I've just recently got myself a handheld but I haven't had the energy to tinker around on it just yet.

i use arch btw. if you don't have console-phobia it's one of the easiest distros to use, easy to install new software and is not prone to breaking as much as people say (well it depends on your use case mine's been pretty stable).

Been on Debian for the better part of a decade. Won’t be changing anytime soon.

Debiaaaaan. I used Arch at first but it changed too much and broke things too frequently for my liking. With Debian I don't really care about whatever I'm missing out on but it's stable as hell which means it does exactly what I expect it to do, every time.

Mint

EndeavourOS (arch BTW)

Fedora, the KDE spin.

NixOS, really liking the ability to do package and system configuration as code in a single language, and consolidate the configuration for multiple devices in a single repo.

Nobara. it's fedora based but has most of the stuff you need for gaming in by default

only 72 comments? come on everyone, those are rookie numbers

mostly debian

Arch (btw)

At this moment I'm using fedora with KDE and I'm quite enjoying it. It blends together the pros of rolling release with the managed aspects of other distros

Fedora, because it works so well. I use the GNOME desktop because I need the bigger UI elements to use a computer effectively, and I like the workspaces. It's also Fedora's default, and is really seamless.

By the way...

Bazzite on main PC because it just works and I don't want to mess around with nvidia drivers.

Almalinux for home server and anything I need to spin up short term.

Nobara KDE spin on my desktop endeavorOS on my laptop but might switch to vanilla arch on there soon

debian so i don't have to do anything

mint but i had to update the kernel to get some games to work, it was a little intimidating but i ended up getting it to work just by googling and following what other people did in forums

apparently mint is more for ease of use and stability, and less about being cutting edge

NixOS, but looking into GUIX as well.

Hannah Montana

Fedora gnome. For many years

NixOS

I've been using Linux as my daily driver for over a decade and after distro hopping for a few years, I finally settled on Linux Mint because for what it's worth, it just works. It's pretty close to a Windows environment, it's built on top of apt, and it's got good driver support for Nvidia. It comes with mostly useful default software and Nemo is a good file browser.

NixOS

Declarative configuration is so good

Guix, but it's not for linux newbies I think. Although it's completely libre, too much in fact, it didn't have some drivers I need for my laptop so I needed to non-libre it a bit...

Debian is very beginner friendly and very stable, but stable means the software is pretty old compared to other distros. Security updates are timely and everything no trouble on that front, but often I wondered why some app didn't have some feature only to find out it does, for over a year in fact, but the version implementing it hadn't made it through Debians QA yet.

I think it's a really good place to start, but if you find it "lacking" you may want to look into alternatives.

Also remember you can multi-boot, so you can try different distros, or set up a virtual machine to testdrive some distro. It's not terribly difficult but does require some time.

For servers, I'm a CentOS refugee who is stuck with Oracle Linux (*shudder*) because of work reasons, and because I didn't want to get in on the whole Rocky/Alma diaspora. For desktop, I still like Fedora, and for WSL, I think I'm running Ubuntu because fuck it, why not. Fedora was my daily driver for my work machine at my previous job; GNOME on Wayland was buggy as shit back then, but it was still a step up from Windows 10 randomly installing updates and rebooting my machine because I got up to get coffee or to pee. It also helped not having to fuck around with Cygwin to use rsync and scp from my dev workstation.

Oh fucc how did I miss this in my own comm lmao.

I use NixOS with flakes on all my machines. Having your operating system as code is actually far easier to wrap my mind than other distros and it helps with learning how each of the individual components of a GNU system fit together and with Nix I always know roughly how point A -> point B.

Second would always go to Fedora Atomic Desktop since like NixOS your operating system is basically just a schema to write out before hand and then deploy. The commonality being that the Linux joke of "sudo apt install into broken system" is entirely vanquished in favor of user simplicity and I would recommend something like Universal Blue's Bazzite to people wanting to see peak GNU/Linux capabilities.