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The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.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

Fedora just werks™

Finally time to bust this out again.

The amount of software available in the package manager, without adding external repositories, exceeds that I’ve seen in any other distro I’ve used. Even with epel, I feel like others fall short.

The ability to modify the build time flags of software while still using the package manager is also huge. I hate when ffmpeg doesn’t have speex support because some upstream dev figured it was a corner use case.

It’s me, I’m the target demographic. I’m the one asshole who wants to build ffmpeg with speex support, clamav without milter support and rxvt WITHOUT blink support.

There are some pretty great userspace helpers too. Things to ensure your kernel is always built with the same options. Things to upgrade all your python or perl modules to the new interpreter version for you. Tools for rebuilding all the things based on a reverse dependency search.

Slotted installs are handled in a sane, approachable, and manageable way.

The filesystem layout is standards compliant.

I recall someone on /r/Gentoo saying something like “Gentoo is linux crack, when you get a handle on it, nothing compares.”

When I boot my laptop into fedora/arch/mint/etc (or really any non-bsd based distro), I feel like I’m using someone else’s laptop. There are a bunch of git repos under /usr/src for the software I wanted that wasn’t in the package manager. I need to manage their updates separately. Someone else has decided which options are in this very short list of GUIs. I’m using whatever cron daemon they chose, not the one I want. Why is there a flat text log file under /var/db/? Why won’t you just let me exist without any swap mounted? $PATH is just a fucking mess.

Fedora because it’s boring in the best ways. Curious about NixOS though.

debian is bestian

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it has been the most stable and flexible experience I’ve had that worked out of the box. I have tried a lot of distros over the years, and openSUSE has really held up.

Additionally, I use Nobara for a multi-purpose machine that I also occasionally use for gaming (that’s why Nobara instead of openSUSE: it gets me slightly higher %1 lows and is less effort to set up for gaming) and a Void Linux machine for programming. Nobara is pretty good, by far the best gaming oriented distro I’ve tried, but I do regret that it’s Fedora based. Void is really fantastic, but for some reason it only boots on my System76 laptop, so that’s the only device I use it on 🤷.

Void is an arch-killer for me; it’s faster, has huge repos, and offers a similar experience. I honestly prefer it, and would probably use it on most of my machines if it weren’t for the booting issue (it’s been a few months since I last tried, so things might have changed though). OpenSUSE is king for low-effort stability and flexibility though.

Well, those are my two cents. Good day y’all!

PC: Cachyos love the aur and the compiler optimizations + they compile or put aur packages in their repos which saves time by not making you compile anything
Phone: Android (does it count??)

Fedora (workstation) is the first distro I actually managed to daily drive. Its modern, stable, and I didnt have to spend to much time in getting everything to work how I want it. Tried some distros in the past but they never stuck (Ubuntu, mint, popOS).

Curious about arch but I think I will stick Fedora for now.

Debian for everything since it’s one of the few distros that has always been there. It’s one of the second distros to come after after SLS. Distros come and go, but Debian marches on.

Fedora Gnome. I like it and it just works for my daily office use. I don’t have the time nor the mental strength to fiddle with different distro’s on a regular basis.

Void linux. Both on wayland + labwc desktop and radpberrypi 4 server with multiple dockers, and a bootable usb for my work laptop. Why? Its lightweight, rolling, rock stable, and easily extendable. I love runit for its simplicity. Love xbps package manager for its speed, and love the good and clear documentation.

Arch. Started using it in high school. Never had a reason to switch. Now I’m just regularly frustrated by other distros trying to make things easier by abstracting simple configurations behind layers of custom scripts.

Fedora because it has (IMO) the best vanilla GNOME experience. Every application is in the same theme and looks similar.

Arch. Purely because of the Arch Wiki. I honestly think it’s the easiest OS to troubleshoot as long as you are willing and able to read every now and again.