Mint, first one I tried, and works just fine. It’s xfce with i3wm.

Alpine:

• Rolling release (Alpine Edge) yet stable
• Extremely lightweight
• Very customizable
• After setting it up I find that it works very well
• Decently sized repo
• OpenRC rather then SystemD (I prefer the way it handles services)

2 flavors of Fedora with KDE on it:

1. Aurora-DX for some dev work on the side. Once you get used to distroboxing / devcontainers, it’s rock-solid and mean dev environment (saw some minor issues with how certain GUI apps were scaled, but that’s about it).
2. Nobara for gaming (tried Bazzite and it’d prolly work for that purpose as well).

Unfortunately, had to keep Windows on one other machine (removed you KORG for not providing anything working on Linux), but that’s limited to being a glorified music player now 😄

Began moving all my hardware to Linux this year since none of them will run win11 without fk-about-ing - and I just don’t want to. So my server, media box and laptop are all cut over, only my main desktop left on windows a bit longer but it’s goose is cooked too.

I’ve tried dozens of distros over the years but I’ve settled on Fedora KDE.

The why:

• Skipping x11 and head straight into Wayland so I don’t have to worry about that in the future.
• I wanted something more up to date than debian-based and less cutting edge then Arch-based.
• Stability and support of being in the RHEL family
• Flatpaks
• Tried to get on with gnome to get away from the ‘start menu’ paradigm but ended up getting on with kde better.

Different distros for different uses:

• Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
• Nobara for my main gaming PC.
• Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
• Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.

I’m currently using bazzite due to its really solid out of the box support for gaming hardware and peripherals.

I’m really surprised everyone uses arch. I have three theories as to why:

1. There actually aren’t that many arch uses but when arch users have the opportunity they won’t hesitate to say “BTW I use arch” were as others don’t really bother.
2. There are lots of arch users and everyone uses it because they want to be able to say “BTW I use arch”
3. (Very unlikly) There are lots of arch users and it’s because it’s actually a good distro that people like.

(This is mostly a joke jsyk I’m sure arch is a great distro)

Primarily I use Arch on my desktop (and by proxy, my Steam Deck which runs SteamOS), which is what I’ve landed on after a ton of distro hopping. The idea of Atomic distros catches my eyes, but for me in its present state there are too many steps needed in order to make deeper changes (for example, installing a kernel module) - but I quite like SteamOS on my Deck since I know it will always be in a “consistent” state, for example.

On servers I run a mix of Rocky Linux and Debian.

Arch mostly so i can get whatever package i want without having to use flatpak. don’t get me wrong i love them, however i don’t have the best internet so updating a whole other environment was quite the burden which is why i stooped using pop os and went back to arch. It also kept me from enjoying Fedora Silverblue on my laptop so i guess i am sticking with arch till i get better internet xD

im a notorious distro hopper lmao, right now i am using manjaro for the first time. previously i was using Pop OS where i had plasma installed for the DE rather than using cosmic or whatev they call it… but it seemed like there were a few issues between Pop and plasma, so i hopped to manjaro

first time using a distro that uses pacman so there are a few growing pains for me

Fedora 41 KDE Plasma

For the simple, shallow reason it looks great and feels snappy.

Personal rabble:

Cachyos.

Used to use pure arch but I like the cachy optimisations and their repos

I use Fedora on my desktop, and mint on my laptop (this one is going to get wiped soon for Fedora as well). I tried manjaro but it just wasn’t for me. I installed it on the recommendation of my friend, and I like it a lot. Except for it not staying asleep because a part on the motherboard kept sending a wake command -__- . But a CMD fixed that issue.

Gentoo for anything my I use a mouse with, Arch for everything else. I like Gentoo for the customization. For things where I want to run a service, Arch is my go to as it keeps working without drama. Anything complicated, Gentoo is better.

Currently, Arch btw. I was on Ubuntu in the 12* days, but arch wiki had the solutions to every problem I encountered, so naturally migrated. I want to switch to NixOS but ran into some issues getting my finicky nvidia/amdgpu laptop to work. I might go blendOS as a holdover, it seems like a good mix of the two. Also I have some issues with Manjaro (tried for a while) but pamac cli at least handles all of my aur and pacman needs properly.

LMDE. It really does just work.