Linux

Fedora is my daily driver.

I install Ubuntu LTS for family/friends, as the more stable software makes supporting them easier, and they should have a few years of no major problems if I get hit by a truck.

unless we're talking about my main machine, which runs gentoo, i'll always default to alpine. super solid base system and packages. super accessible when it comes to upstreaming packages. I only wish they had s6 as an option for init/service manager

Void linux, but if you're somewhat savvy and don't mind spending some time fixing your flow in the beginning, Gentoo/Funtoo is a nice flex

Xubuntu - great ootb configuration, lightning fast on my old thinkpad without compromising on functionality

For stability, I would definitely suggest a immutable distro

Fedora XFCE, The only 2 times I ever have to touch the command line are for flatpak and for updateing, so I am not sure if I would recomend the XFCE spin, but I would recomend Fedora, probably the KDE, only because I for what ever reason cannot stand Gnome, I do not know why, but I just cannot get my workflow to work with gnome

I use Arch because it is generally the easiest one I've found to pretend it's 2010 again. Most Linux distributions are fine, but they've all been busy trying to solve problems I don't have and accepting that some niche corner cases are fine to break. I'm just a niche corner case in general.

I have nothing against Wayland trying to modernize the UI stack, but if their answer to half the things I need is "well the compositor should do that" and the compositor doesn't in fact do that yet, then I don't want to use Wayland yet. I have nothing against Flatpak trying to modernize application packaging, but their current story for making applications available from a shell is effectively "why do you want to do that", and well...I do want to do that, so I guess I don't really want to use Flatpak yet.

That's just me. Like I said...I'm a corner case. I understand that everyone else wants their computer to be an appliance that does what most people need without requiring any tinkering. And I'm not opposed to getting rid of the need to tinker. I'm too old to view tinkering to make something work as I thing I look forward to. I just view tinkering as a one-time cost with perpetual returns. I'm OK editing an xkb file to make some obscure input device work the way I want it to, because that might take me an afternoon, and then I just have that device do exactly what I want for the rest of its life with no further effort. Make it so that I never have to edit another xkb file again and I'll be just fine. But you can't do it by just saying, "no more needing xkbcomp because it doesn't work anymore, and if you needed it, go see if the compositor vendor will write some code for you".

An immutable OS with flatpak, snap or appimage :

Fedora silverblue, nixos, vanilla os, guix, steam deck...

While there is still lot limitation using only flatpak, snap or appimage, i believe that in the next decade they will slowly grow and end up that packaging nightmare.

So we can have an OS up to date, latest app without worrying any breakage. But i'm not well versed and dunno if people and dev will follow that road.

I think it's time to ditch apt, dnf, rpm, aur. I imagine it would ease dev work but i'm not sure.

Void Linux is the way to go, I've been using it for a few years now with no issues. Currently gaming with arch but I was gaming on void for a while, before I decided to hop. Might go back but switching over is such a hassle at the moment.

I use Debian for servers. I recently began migrating from Arch on my desktops to NixOS. The shift from the fantastic Arch wiki documentation to the NixOS documentation was a huge stumbling block, but I got through it. It took a lot of time to get NixOS to a nice state on my main laptop, but once I did, installing it to my 2013 macbook air and configuring it to be exactly like my main laptop took all of 15 minutes. That was a huge deal for me. The next hurdle is going to be installing it on my desktop with nvidia GPU, but I don't expect it will take too long.

I'll probably start migrating servers to NixOS where I can, too.

Here is my NixOS config repo, if that helps: https://github.com/thejevans/nix-config/

Alpine Linux, repositories contain most software for a desktop and server, minimal base system, fast package manager. I would only recommend it to an advanced user that does not use proprietary software as most of it will not run because it is linked against glibc but alpine linux uses musl libc.

I use Gentoo for my daily driver, and Debian for servers.

Don't yell but Fedora/Ubuntu was my first exposure to Linux so I'm prejudiced toward them. I didn't have a lot of exposure to 'nix in the 90s since the family only had Windows.

Right now I use pop_os. I bought a System76 laptop so it came with it. I like it because most things just work and I am lazy. Not the biggest gnome fan though. Previous to owning this laptop I tinkered with many distros but usually leaned towards lightweight DEs like xfce.

Solus - get updates all the time, don't have to think about reinstalling and don't have to pay attention if an update could break my system

Lubuntu my beloved. Ubuntu enough for me to google myself out of anything but lightweight enough to make me feel good about what I'm spending cycles/battery on... and familiar enough that I don't need to learn a whole new desktop paradigm when all I'm gonna do with the desktop gui is start an app anyway.

I use Pop_OS because I really like having so much much GUI control via the keyboard. I'm patiently waiting for Cosmic to update things a bit.

draft - am I allowed to type "chromeos"

U want stability stick to debian, bleeding egde apps? NixOs.

Middle ground? Ubuntu Rolling, u get reasonable up to day updates, and reasonable stability.

And remember, the perfect distro is the one u configure, and personalize for u. The distro is only gonna make ur life easier in making it urs, but that's all, I wasted a lot of time understanding this.

openSuse. After my years of distro hopping ended over a decade ago I settled on openSuse Leap and never switched to something else again. It's reliable and gives me the least bullshit. And by now it's the one I have the most experience in.

//edit
Leap on my server and tumbleweed on my work laptop but Leap would be sufficient there, too.

So I use Arch for my personal work. I never had a problem with stability. I've also started to be interested in NixOS, but I'm gonna just use it as an Server OS, I feel like it makes sense with the infrastructure as code implications.

Debian and Mint are my favorites. I love the included games in Debian, the UI for both (Using cinnamon), and their ease of use.