Linux

Go to? Probably Mint. Such a good distro. Unfortunately I recently joined camp KDE Plasma and no other desktop environment can even compare.
I'm on Fedora KDE now. Solid distro for now at least.
If I need to return to monkee: EndeavourOS

I semi-regularly distro-hop, but Xubuntu is the distro I keep coming back to between hops to take a break or when one goes (temporarily) dormant. It's currently running on my primary server/linux machine.

Reasons: 1.) It's light on resources 2.) It's very simple and clean. 3.) It works with all the programs I use regularly; only one needs to be hand-compiled (but that one has to be compiled for literally any Linux machine). 4.) I know it. Scrub/partition/install/configure in under an hour. I can pick up any of my projects again immediately where I left off.

I love Kubuntu. Plasma reminds me of windows 10 layout which I prefer over the windows 11/ Mac drawer layout.

Manjaro - because everyone else seems to only be voting for Arch itself here. Manjaro is actually very stable, but I did sometimes have some trouble with AUR updates clashing. I like it because it stays relatively up to date and I don't have to do any major reinstalls or upgrades. I've been on it for a few years and never have lost data or was not able to get it started (even if it did need a manual kick-start once or twice). Like any distro, over time you become savvy around what to use and what to avoid.

I use manjaro, if you like the up-to-dateness of arch, with the polish and ease of setup of popos, it may be a great candidate for you.

mint for my laptop running awesomewm and lightened it up a bit - To have a no-thrills always works never complaints machine.

fedora server edition plus awesomewm for my desktop

Fedora, although I dislike SELinux and I think they should have a less strict policy with regards to FLOSS. Like, I prefer FLOSS over proprietary software, but I just wish they'd be a bit more pragmatic and allow both on the default repos and just leave it up to the user to decide what to use and what not. I guess that would also prevent dilemmas like the recent hardware acceleration drama?

Otherwise I like their balance between stability and being up to date, fast update cycle and the large amount of available packages.

Arch Linux. Because... it's rock n' rolling!

Anything Arch, because it's hard, it's a pain in the ass and as an intermediate user I need Arch to break on me so I can fix it and learn.

Ubuntu because it's Linux Easy-Mode

I would only recommend it to Windows users looking to start using Linux. The average Linux user is a lot more tech-literate than me and can use the more difficult but more customizable and streamlined distros, and the average Windows user has no chance on Linux, not even Ubuntu which was already a lot of work for me to switch to

Daily drive Gnentoo, not sure if I could ever wholeheartedly recommend it since it's not really accessible for beginners...

If I need a VM I'd probably spin up an Arch or Alpine since they are relatively minimal & are not that difficult to set up once you're familiar with stuff (well Arch is one-command setup now). For servers... pretty much Debian always since that's what everyone supports

Stability-wise... I guess it depends on what type of "stability" I want? If I meant stability by having stable programming environments then it's not compatible with having new updates, Debian probably would be best for that. If I meant stability by the system not breaking too often, then most rolling release distros are probably fine? Arch/Gentoo have a lot more room for user error which is probably where most of the instability comes from, but otherwise they typically don't have too many issues I believe. Fedora is great but there's been some issue with RHEL going close-source, so I guess some ppl won't want to support that endeavor

btw arch Linux