Arch, pacman is why

Kubuntu on my desktop, I prefer KDE as a DE and I’m used to the Debian ecosystem.

Linux Mint on my relatively low powered laptop that I rarely use.

Debian stable on my media server.

Bazzite for my gaming pc, steam deck, and family members. It just works and they cant fuck it up. Even brother laser printers official drivers installed for my mom’s comp. Gotta check the details of that cups exploit though. My gamig pc is also the fallback pc I expect to always have working and for servicing any others if problems come up.

Arch or arch based, except manjaro which has screwed me over too many times, for having easy access to pretty much any software that can run on linux, or just stuff that requires too many hoops to jump through to get working on atomic distros like bazzite.

Dietpi on my SBCs like the ones running klipper for my 3d printers

Debian for my servers, homeassistant etc, but I’m planning on checking out coreos.

Also alpine just because.

Fedora KDE.

I was happily using Windows 10 until a few months ago, but needed to build a new PC. I got a glimpse of Windows 11 on a friend’s laptop and didn’t like it. So I asked my Linux-friend which distribution he would recommend to someone who wants to try Linux, but doesn’t want to stray too far away from the windows look and feel.

Alpine Linux. It’s pretty lightweight (uses ~250MiB on idle with sway), is easy to install and is super stable. My only criticism is that there is quite a lot of software not available in the repos, but this is mainly fixed by flatpaks.

Arch.

Because of pacman. Building and writing packages is simple and dependencies are slim. Also packages are recent. And most likely “there is an AUR package for that”. Also stack transitions arrive early, like pipewire.

Also let’s not forget Arch Wiki, i bet you have read it as a non Arch user.

I administer Arch on 8 machines including gaming rigs, home server, web server, kids laptop, wifes gaming desktop, audio workstation and machine learning rig and a bunch of dev laptops. I also use ArchARM on RPi for some home automation.

Never considered switching since I switched from Ubuntu over 15 years ago.

I do have experience with several other rpm and apt based distros.

Opensuse TW. It is rolling release and rock solid. Also amazing btrfs implementation.

I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can’t be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.

So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.

COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.

Nix because I have a bad memory and hate doing things more than once

I’ve been using Bazzite for a few months now (switched from EndeavourOS, which was great) and it’s been amazing. I’m sold on atomic/immutable. I have never had a PC this stable, including every Windows PC I’ve had.

And it’s perfect for gaming. There are weird little tweaks and settings that I had to do on EOS to get my GPU working correctly, etc., and they all just work out of the box in Bazzite (I did get the iso image made specifically for my laptop, which definitely helps). It’s super impressive actually.

And distrobox (BoxBuddy comes installed) can be used to access the AUR or whatever if I feel the need to. Just fire up an Arch box, and have at it.

Because the logo is cool :)

I use NixOS for my desktop because I hate myself you can configure everything without needing to edit a bunch of different config files that use different configuration languages.

I use Arch btw for my Minecraft server because I am crazy.

Fedora KDE, because my preferred distro Mint Cinnamon doesn’t at the moment have good support for things like FreeSync.

Tuxedo OS. Before that, I was very happy with Fedora, and then I got a tuxedo laptop and tried their distro. Now, I keep using that because I started to enjoy KDE, and I really like their hardware support and how they test and maintain the distro.

openSUSE Tumbleweed. I’ve tried switching to Aurora and Bazzite, but ended up using openSUSE again and now I love it even more.

EDIT: Typos.

EDIT 2: I also love tinkering with Void and Alpine on VMs.