Linux

Fedora. Mainly because I work at a RHEL shop and I want a daily driver that is somewhat similar to my work environment.

Xubuntu for "I need this to just work" daily driving, and assorted other stuff for screwing around with. I like the idea of immutable OSes and have considered silverblue and am watching the development of vanillaos...

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.

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 keep coming back to Fedora and I used to hate GNOME but I've learn to appreciate it "just working out of the box". I used to be config tweaker master but now appreciate things just working for the most part without me touching it.

In general, Ubuntu is my go-to when I just want something that works and is reasonably stable. Just pick the spin with the Desktop Environment that you like. I'm using KDE Neon (I realize Neon isn't an Ubuntu flavor or spin) on my daily driver laptop, and Ubuntu MATE on my desktop. I also have an old netbook that usually gets Xubuntu, but currently has Fedora 37 XFCE as an experiment.

It sure is nice that we have to option to distro-hop, either on bare metal or in a VM.

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

Fedora for me as it seems to work the best for my hardware, will be moving to Kinoite when I get the chance. i already am using distrobox and Flatpak in general. Tried NixOS (with Root on ZFS) but couldn't get hp-wmi module to work on on it. I was having some problems with Opensuse Nvidia drivers (wakeup from suspend didn't work sometimes). The one thing I miss on Fedora, that Opensuse has is Full-Disk Encryption.

I have been a Linux user since the Red Hat Halloween release (back in the twentieth century) and have run SUSE, Slackware, Red Hat, Arch, Debian and countless of their forks. Currently I'm settled on Pop!_OS 22.04 NVIDIA for my daily driver laptop with a built-in Nvidia GPU. It is rock solid and can run my three displays, each with a different resolution and refresh rate, without ever missing a beat. For everything else I use Debian and most of my clients run either RHEL or Oracle SEL on their production servers.

TL;DR: Pop!_OS daily driver and Debian for everything else.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

draft - am I allowed to type "chromeos"

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

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.