This is a community that is only for nerds jk. everyone who doesn't scare when seeing UNIX terminal welcome! rules:
I'm a grumpy old man when it comes to OSes. I started on Gentoo, used Arch for a while, a few years of Ubuntu, then a bunch of different Ubuntu-based distros, Fedora and all the Fedora spins, even ran the Hannah Montana OS as a meme for a week.
Eventually, got bored of the latest shiny things and fixing the best thing ever, and am using Kubuntu with Wayland. It just works, got no complaints.
even ran the Hannah Montana OS as a meme for a week
We should both commit to exclusively using TempleOS and see who can last the longest.
NixOS for several years now. It's a big up-front cost but you can't go back from atomic upgrades and rollbacks.
Not Arch!!!
why not!?
ignore. testing in prod!?
I have tried them all. The one wo never let me down was Debian stable. I use it for 8 years now on desktop, gaming rig and server.
The ones that come close are Alpine Linux and Ubuntu LTS.
I've been on Linux Mint (LM) for like 3+ years now. I was dual booting Windows, but after not booting into Win for over a year, I wiped its hard drive and started using it as backup storage. Before that, I did the rounds (Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, etc.), but mostly stuck between Kubuntu and LM. LM just seems to work the best for me. Never have any difficulties with anything and love how I can customize Cinnamon. It really just works out well for me.
My first foray was with Ubuntu and Mint, and I found the whole experience far too on-rails for me. A few years later, I made the permanent move from Windows to Arch, largely because of how good their documentation on GPU passthrough via OVMF/VFIO was. It was also an excellent opportunity to be forced to learn how my computer works.
Ironically, I almost never open virtual machines for gaming, I have come across very very little that cannot be handled by wine, ge-wine, or proton.
macOS at work and Debian on my personal computer.
Slackware. Though I can make most things work.
EndeavourOS. It's Arch but without the faff, it just works and looks gorgeous.
I use windows because that's where I can play overwatch and fortnite. That's literally the only reason. And photoshop, but krita is almost just as good. If I didn't play games not available on Linux I'd probably use Ubuntu instead. Why? Easy to install, very customizable, better for programming, scriptable.
MacOS for work (very simple wireless packet captures, full m$ office suite with little effort). Servers are Debian, used to be Arch but I didn't upgrade enough / I upgraded too much / you get the idea and things went boom too often (Nextcloud in particular). Does SteamOS count too? I think it's pretty rad.
I'm mainly using Fedora these days, but for some games I still have to dualboot Windows, which I can't say I'm enjoying. Just over an hour ago the Nvidia drivers crashed. On Windows. Repeatetly.
Anyway, I'm quite happy with Fedora but I haven't tried many OS to be honest. I prefer stability over the slight advantages other OS might have
MacOS for work and most things, Windows for gaming. After years of distro hopping I am now enlightened, free stuff is free for a reason.
SteamOS on my Steam Deck is great though, and gives me hope for the future of Linux gaming, but it's not here just yet.