Linux

Mint, actually. I tried it and found it too similar to windows and not customisable enough for my liking.

I used Ubuntu for a few years, and always felt that it works well and was super easy to set up. But it also seemed to use a lot of disk space. This was of course not ubuntu‘s fault, but my inexperience. But I never had to look under the hood, so I didn’t, and I ended up installing a bunch pf bloat, some of which ended up causing minor issues eventually.

I decided to try arch, and get more into configuration and learning linux. It was quite a ride, and I am happy to have gone through with it. I’m still learning, but I have so much more knowledge & control over what the PC does and how it does it. I also have a lot more room for games and such.

Pop os. I just couldn't use their desktop (even though I think it's good, it's just not for me)

Ubuntu

It pains me to say this, but voidlinux, though I'm still not in the stage of "this one is not for me", it has potential and hopefully I can sort all the issues I've encountered so far.

I've tried multiple distros, and also used artix for a while so I'm used to not using systemd but man void is really another thing, this isn't the first time I've used it, I tried it a year ago and gave up, recently I decided that I'm up for the challenge and began using it again, here's what has happened so far:

Well right now I'm dealing with the pc freezing when quitting the user session, for some reason I need to exit i3 before logging out, otherwise the system freezes.

Also I wasn't able to get a clean boot screen even though I had the typical kernel parameters quiet, loglevel, etc, it even prints info on the login prompt where I should be putting my username, though I managed to mitigate this a lot by passing a kernel parameter that tells it to use another tty for the boot messages.

file-roller is broken, I can't compress some directories to 7zip, the weird thing is that it only happens to some directories and not all.

Though the very good news is that they fix issues very fast, puddletag was broken and they fixed it in like 2 hours after I reported the issue.

Edit: It is not just file-roller that is broken, it is all of 7zip on void, I can't compress with xarchiver either

Never tried regular Arch after trying Black Arch, so not sure if they're the same feel, but after realizing the work it would take just to be given the capability to resize windows in the UI instead of just coming with drag and resize out of the box, Black Arch was a huge no go for me... Which kept me from wanting to touch regular Arch, lol. That being said, I go nope to Ubuntu the most. Gentoo is my favorite and is what my server has been running for the past decade without any kind of issue, but for laptop and daily use, I use Mint. Been on that one for about a decade now too... Used to use Peppermint (that still a thing?) and Suse the most before those.

I feel like I'm a chronic distro-hopper sometimes, but no matter how many times I try, I just can't settle into OpenSUSE for whatever reason. The OBS feels a bit more of a wild west than the AUR.

Literally all of them have shite color management and fractional scaling that blurs everything. It's an eyesore.

I really, really want to use Linux for multimedia consumption but I can't.

Arch

I’ve messed with a decent amount, listed in my post. Most distros weren’t customized the way that I wanted them to be or I didn’t like the looks so I prefer Debian and Arch for simplicity’s sake depending on the use case and going from there.

In 2007 I tried Ubuntu and it was weird, then again in 2008, no! In 2009 I found Mint and was really happy, until they stopped supporting KDE. Then I tried a ton of distros, Xfce, no. Lxde, no. open suse, no. fedora, no, lots of others, no. I finally found Kubuntu and I have been on it ever since. Even tested Neon lately but hated it.
Kubuntu does what I want it to do.
Linux always seems scary at first, but once you learn enough, it's super easy.

anything with GNOME or xfce. modern cinnamon is ok ig but KDE plasma just makes anything bearable for me