Why do you use the distro you use?

My gaming rig is on arch because i need the aur. I use my gaming rig for a bit of development too, dependencies are super easy on arch.
All my laptops, work and personal, run fedora kde because its rock solid and has the best "just works" features while still being a technical distro.
My servers are either alpine because its lightweight and easy to harden, debian for the stability and minimalism. I do have a few arch servers, but those are for testing and they get spun up, do the work they need and then killed.
DietPi for my raspberry because its debian based and has a plethora of automations to do what ever you like with your raspberry. Works on desktop too, well.
Lastly, mint, on my surface pro 5, because it is my obe device that is meant to just browse and be a portal into the internet or to play some movie or something while we are out for vacations or stuff like that.
There are many other distros that I like and use, but I use these the most. I love how each linux distro has its stregths and weaknesses, each their own usecase, you get to finetune what you need to make your life easier.

Pop OS. Don't use much of its custom features since I have installed sway on top of it and did some custom edits, was thinking of switching to another distro but they announced COSMIC, which looks very cool. Why not stick with the distro that could have the best experience with it?

Nobara: Has all the gaming features I want on my gaming pc (like gamescope) and is htpc capable. Also, it’s based on Fedora, which I’m familiar with.
Fedora: I like gnome and it’s always fairly up to date and rock solid. Great on my laptop.
Have considered switching to openSUSE though. It’s German (as am I), it’s the first Linux distro I ever used (on my granddad’s PC, more than a decade ago) and I’ve heard a lot of good about tumbleweed.

SteamOS: because it came with my Steam Deck.
LinuxMint: because it is an Ubuntu-derivative and widely used which makes finding solutions and packages easier and I like MATE.

Steam OS on Steam Deck. Fedora on Framework13 cause reliability. Garuda Mokka on Framework16 cause pretty and it just works.
May move from Garuda back to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed or CachyOS at some point.

Fedora because it just works and I don't have to mess with it.

@aleq
I'm using #endeavouros with Gnome on my Desktop at the moment, just because I wanted to try Arch with all the priorly mentioned arguments, rolling release, Wiki and so on.
I started with Slackware in the early 90s, SuSE and Red Hat (Fedora today) just for fun and self-education, even though Slackware wasn't fun at all. This distro brought me nights without sleep and full of tears. 😂🫣
I tried a couple of times to switch to Linux on the desktop but never got it to work satisfyingly like Windows with all my private and business applications and games.
So Linux and I had an on and off relationship over decades. I wanted to love Linux so badly, but it was never reasonable to run it on the desktop.
Let's see how we're going to end, Arch/Endeavour and me.
On a server I would not switch from a Debian-based distro, just because I'm used to it and I would also prefer stable instead of rolling releases.

Bazzite, Aurora, Proxmox and Ubuntu Server.

EndeavourOS because of the AUR

Because it's not Windows. So fed up with it. Used Debian. But as of late gotten annoyed with them and everything seems to lead me towards Arch. Dunno. We'll see. Just a bit scary to switch as I'm used with apt and not Pacman or whatever it's called :P Need to learn to make backup on the system in case something breaks etc
- You are going to want to use the AUR, so you need yay or paru (not just pacman). You can either still use pacman (for non-AUR stuff) or just one of the others for everything.
  They all use the same switches.

I favour Arch because I prefer everything I want to install to be in the package repo and for it to be a version actually new enough to use.
But I actually use EndeavourOS because it is 99% Arch but installs easily with full hardware support on everything I own (including a T2 Macbook). It never fails me.
And now I have realized that I can use Distrobox to get the Arch repos and the AUR on any dostro I wish.
So, I now have Chimera Linux on 4 machines because it is the best engineered distro in my view. The system supervisor, system compiler, and C library matter to me (not to everyone). All these machines have the AUR on them (via distrobox). Best of all worlds.

Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I've ever had to type out.
- How long have you used it and how is it?
  I'm pretty curious about those kinds of distros, and don't really like how nixos is completely hosted on github (and all the drama that constantly comes from the community, and the bad documentation for many things, ...).
  However, guix seems such a niche project that I feel like it can't really be used.
  
  About a year and a half.
  To be honest it's not "easy" to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.
  To use it like any other distro you're going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.
  Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.
  There's also The toybox
  
  Some additional nice things about guix:
  Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.
  Shepherd is hands down the best init program I've ever used. It's just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.
  The OS documentation is built into the distro, with "info guix" you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.

I primarily run Linux server distros for what I like to do. I usually do Debian since it's a nice base to just add whatever on to (sudo isn't even installed out of the box) so I have been working on a customized install script but if I don't feel like messing around too much I just go with Ubuntu and avoid using snaps for anything I care about (especially Docker, like wtf is with the snap version of Docker). I like the default toolset of Debian based distros and not having to screw with SELinux.

EndeavourOS. It's the only one I tried that worked with my sound card out of the box strangely enough...

I run SteamOS on desktop hardware because I hate windows and it solves almost every Linux gaming problem out of the box...
- How?
- Is there an official build for general release, or are you running a steam image built for a handheld?

I use Mint. I had a phase with different distros, but when I had my son, and he turned 3, I installed Linux Mint for him. Little by little, I started using it myself. Today my son is in the military service and I still use Mint.

Debian/KDE because I like the way I can customize (1 panel on the left with everything) No features removed just as one gets used to them. (looking at you gnome) No breaking changes to the desktop gadget api every update (you gnome again) Nice big repo.

Ubuntu. It was reccomended to me by a few of my mor knowledgeable friends, and I haven't had any major issues with it. The operating system is doing what I need it to and I just can't find any motivation to want to change.

Wanted to try out wayland and fedora was recommended as the best experience for that during those years. Discovered the most polished, stable and smooth Linux experience I'd had to date. Mostly used ubuntu distros and arch before. Never looked back. Upgraded to Silverblue to try out the future of linux. Haven't changed anything since. Been about 3 years now on Silverblue.

The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.
That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.
I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.
For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.

Arch: I have the most up to date computer in the whole world, I have the AUR, no one can stop me
switches to Debian
Debian: My packages are so stable, nothing can break the eternal peace of my system's packages
switches back to Arch
- I have Debian on a laptop that I don't use that much, and I use Nix package manager for managing the apps I use.
  Running Arch was a nightmare, as I was updating once every 1-2 months and I was getting lots of conflicts.

On my main desktop I'm using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.
Linux Mint Cinnamon didn't run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who's implementation of KDE?
I've spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I'd rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I'm not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I've been around long enough to go "Remember PeppermintOS? You don't, okay." So I'm looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.
I've never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I've tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don't know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

Nixos because... I feel like were already loud enough of a crowd everyone should know its benefits lol

Arch on the Desktop, Debian on the servers for peace oft mind.

I dual boot Fedora KDE and Arch.
I've used Mint before and I've little to no qualms with it, but I wanted to move away from X-11, which has no GUI isolation. Hence the switch to Fedora, which has a smooth Wayland experience and also happens to have SELinux out-of-the-box.

I use opensuse (tumbleweed and slowroll) because I just wanted to try it out a few years back and it mostly just works.
If I were to reinstall today, I'd probably use fedora again, since it's much easier to use things like Waydroid.

I use Debian on machines I don't want to fuck with or have change much.
I use Endeavour because it was recommended to me for the bleeding edge hardware I had just bought for gaming.

I use Arch (btw) because CachyOS was giving me issues.

It was the first one using Wayland by default that worked on my machine out of the box.

I've been using Garuda for... Two or three years? I've done a lot of distro-hopping looking for something that won't just break on me. I used Ubuntu for a long time but kept running into situations where it would break, such as boot loops. Eventually I settled on Garuda because it ships with newer software and Nvidia drivers, which is helpful because I use my PC for gaming. I have stuck around because it's garuda-update command automatically makes a backup of your system out of the box, and you can select to boot into a backup in grub then restore it really easily. There have been a couple times where something has broken on an update, but when that happens I can immediately restore the backup, and I don't even need to remember to run a backup manually. I do feel that the default theme is a bit gaudy so I swapped it to a default KDE, but other than that I've had pretty much only good experiences with Garuda.

Debian Stable.
I've used plenty of distros but Debian continues to give me a stable, predictable OS that allows me to get done what I need to get done with no real surprises. I have used it for many years and know how it works very well at this point.
Its my computing equivalent of a comfy and sturdy pair of well worn boots.
- I don't like changes, that's why I like Debian Stable.

I use bazzite. I prefer fedora (that's what I have on my laptop) but the Nvidia drivers consistently give me trouble with fedora on my desktop. I'd get it stable for a little bit then something broke. eventually I got tired of it and tried bazzite since I had heard it was better in that regard. I love the out of the box Nvidia support as well as the HDR support with no extra steps. I'm really not a fan of immutable distros in general, I think rebuilding the ostree everytime I need to install a system package not available in any other way is super annoying, but it just works and that enough for me right now. I also enjoy some of the software it comes packaged with, like btrfs snapper and a very comprehensive ffmpeg build. I'll probably switch away from it to try something new this summer, but at least until my finals are over I just need it's stability.

Mint. Just because it works with zero issues on the desktop. Everything else is either Rocky, RH or Debian.

Fedora just werks™
- Haven't used the command line since installing Kinoite, it's... weird.
  
  I use gnome software all the time and since the new update it's so much faster

Fedora. I've been using it since Fedora Core 1 and was mostly RedHat before that. I don't have time to muck around with my desktop and Fedora almost always just works. I've had too many problems with Ubuntu and Suse and friends. And while I like Arch and Debian and others, I just want my desktop to be point and click. My days off tinkering on my desktop are long gone. Kids, house, work, wife, grandkids, other hobbies keep me busy. I save tinkering for my selfhosting adventures.

Mine may be the funniest
I used to always recommend people use Linux Mint as their first distro, but then it hit me, how can I recommend something I only installed for five minutes? So I got myself Linux Mint, it was 21.3 Virginia at that time, now I have more important things to do in my system and it has stayed.
I used Arch in my old laptop for 2 and half years, learned alot of things from Arch, also got to know some people in the Arch unofficial Matrix Room. But I have a new laptop and this is the story.

I dual boot Fedora and Arch. Fedora was just a fluke because it seemed like one of the most mainstream distros, and I was a Linux noob.
I liked Arch though because the Arch wiki is so useful for a beginner to learn from, even if you're not on Arch. At first, Arch seemed too complex and difficult for me, as a beginner, but when I kept finding myself at the Arch wiki when troubleshooting, I realised how powerful good documentation is. I installed Arch with a "fixer-upper" type mindset, with the goal of using the greater power and customisability that Arch offers to build a config/setup that worked for me (learning all the while). It was a good challenge for someone who is mad, but not quite so mad as to dive into Gentoo or Linux From Scratch

I can set everything up from two config files. If I want to set up something on my laptop I got working on my desktop it's just cut and paste.
Guess my distro
- Guix!
- Guix! Nah just kidding, it's gotta be the snowflake one

Finally time to bust this out again.

Mint cuz I'm a newbie and it was recommended.
I tried KDE Neon Plasma a while too and it was doing a weird stuttery jitter thing with the mouse that I didn't like so I switched back.
Mint just hasn't had any huge frustrating problems or anything wrong with it that I couldn't fix in the settings menu. Just how I like it.

Because despite all the people telling me I'm wrong, Kubuntu is still by far the best distro I've ever used. Rock solid, super fast, and continues to improve.
- I always unable to upgrade ubuntu based distros. I always need to reinstall
  
  The only reason my last machine didn't get more than 10 years worth of in-place upgrades was because I decommissioned it as a desktop and turned it into a server, so I wiped it at that point.

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.

My main reason to use arch is the exceptionnally complete and useful arch wiki. Though many pages are useful for other distros as well. With the archlinux and package install guides, it's just a matter of time (and study!) until you know how to get around.

Debian Sid, the unstable rolling release branch of Debian. It has the worst of both Debian and Arch!
On a more serious note, it allows me to have a somewhat standard Debian system with bleeding edge tooling.

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.
- I like Debian for the same reason.

Arch (EndeavourOS but it's the same with an installer, basically): AUR, great Wiki, great community and fresh packages. I'm always open to new stuff but all of this is really hard to beat.

debian is bestian

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

Debian stable (ok, writing this on Debian Trixie which is not stable yet, but nonetheless works w/o trouble in a virtual machine).
I am using Debian for work and on my servers.
Why Debian? Because for my use cases there are no real alternatives at this moment.
I need stable support for Aarch64 and AMD64, which already rules out nearly every other distribution
For desktops I use a highly customized Gnome, which takes some work and my workflow depends on a few plugins, which rules out Fedora
For work I need some 3rd party software repositories which again rule out fast moving distributions and other non mainstream distributions
By now I think I run Debian and distributions based on Debian for nearly 3 decades, everything I need works stable and good enough at this moment and I accumulated a lot of knowledge about how things work in Debian
Some of my hardware needs workarounds (not because it is too new), and again I know my way around Debian and how to patch/fix things for my hardware
It is nice that I can use Debian for my desktops and my servers on all hardware I own, I would not want to have to learn different Linux systems for desktops and servers or have different versions of software (think Fedora vs. RHEL/CentOS/Alma etc.)
Every 6 month I'll boot Fedoras live cd and play around with the newest Gnome/KDE, but seriously, for at least the last 5 years I never feel like essential improvements are pushed in the newest iterations of Gnome/KDE and I can happily wait the maximum of 2 years until they are released with Debian.
Saying that, I also own a Steam Deck and as an entertainment/media station I totally love what Valve is doing there. I would also be totally happy to run a De-Googled ChromeOS if it would support all the platforms/software etc. I need. For containers I'll also happily use Alpine Linux, if it is possible, but again, I'll mostly default to Debian simply because I know my way around.
In the end, an operating system is just a necessary evil to allow me to do what I want to do with a computer. As long as I have a stable OS which I can tweak to my liking/needs automatically and central package management, I am good. (Unless it is your hobby to play around with your operating system ;-)).

EndeavourOS - I jumped around distros a lot but always found myself coming back to arch. Then I found Endeavour which is just arch with the same basic setup I would always end up doing, so out of convenience I stuck with it

I use PopOS on my desktop. I was looking to upgrade an old Chromebook and while researching my options came dangerously close to buying a MacBook Air. Decided to buy an android tablet instead for my portable computer and bought another SSD so I could dual-boot on my desktop.
It's clean, somewhat macOS like in appearance but I actually have freedom to do what I want. Just in time for Windows 10 sunsetting too.
- I use PopOS too, I am newer to Linux and was recommended this distro as someone that is into gaming. I've had literal zero issues and it has been running all my steam games smooth as butter. Linux is just awesome!

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.

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!
- What issues did you face on Fedora?

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

Ubuntu. Started in the Slackware days, tried a lot of distro's. Got used to debian commands/layouts etc. still happy to move to Centos for security focused installs. I find Ubuntu has a ton of support and general updates that fix anything I can find broken.