Fedora Atomic for user facing devices.

Fedora Server for servers.

Debian on everything.

Debian on my desktop, Fedora on my laptop.

i started off using ubuntu back in the day, but these days i refuse to use any of the distros downstream or tied to a for profit company (so not fedora, opensuse, or ubuntu - and by extension mint), and i prefer distros that are used as the base for other distros rather that ones dependant on another distro (so extra not mint, ubuntu, endeavour, or manjaro).

that leaves, essentially, slackware, arch, and debian.
i am too lazy to learn slackware, so for my main desktop i use arch and for other machines i own i use debian.

departing from the original question:
for new people i mostly recommend cachyos, debian, or bazzite depending on their ability & interest

i feel that, unlike the other ‘arch but easier’ distros, cachy actually adds something to the arch ecosystem (the optimized packages) and the installer showing videos of the different desktop environments all running on cachy is excellent

After some years of distrohopping I had a long time on Ubuntu/Debian, but for partly similar reasons I wanted to change. Fedora, I love it. Smooth nice, out of the way, very fine if you want it to stay out if your way.

Could also drop freebsd in here. Surprisingly easy to install as a desktop with something like xfce, you get zfs on root very easily. Though, there probably will be some applications missing.

Anyway, good luck on your next linux adventure 😀

Mint, after about 20 years of Linux.

I think I tested a bunch of Linux distros about 2006, and settled on running Ubuntu v6 on an old laptop for occasional use and learning. Ubuntu was brown and it looked beautiful.

Later, I dual booted Ubuntu and Windows XP on my main computer from about 2008 until about 2014ish - I remember being annoyed that I had to install some launcher thing called “Steam for Linux” so I could play this newly released Linux game called “Crusader King’s II” (I was sure I’d never use this “Steam” thing for anything else).

2 laptops and one desktop bought since 2014 have been Linux exclusive. The old desktop still chugs along on Ubuntu, having been upgraded through versions for over a decade, and somehow still works. The old laptop and newer laptop (my main machine) have only ever run Mint.

Turns out that “Steam” thing was quite useful.

FreeBSD 😉

Edited to add: I still do use Linux for media and gaming; on those systems I run Mint because it just works out of the box, and seems to randomly change things less frequently than Ubuntu.

It really does not matter which one you use.

I used Ubuntu back when it ran gnome 2, then Arch Linux for servers and my netbook and since 2017 I’m using Fedora as my daily driver and Rocky Linux for servers. I suppose XenServer/xcp-ng is technically also a Linux distribution that I use. AMA?

Windows …

Because I don’t want an OS that just works.

33 years with Linux (kernel 1.2.13, slackware). Worked at a distro. Worked in OS security – Unix and enterprise Linux. I helped build United Linux out of the dismembered corpse suse kicked over the fence as ‘collaboration’.

Because of the validation issue in the .deb package format and others, I’m on a mixture of Rocky and Nobara.

I’m subscribed to cloudLinux’s tuxcare enterprise updates for some older stuff, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s excellent; and if almalinux releases their sLTS distro release and actually covers it for 25 years, that will be such a coup.

I’m worried at the direction Linux has been taken by IBM and I hope it can be unfucked one day. I miss the reliable, fast boots and uncomplicated tooling before this systemd shitshow.

i’ve been using cachyos for three years and have no desire to switch my distro to anything else. before cachy, i used to use ubuntu, mint and mx for over ten years.

Debian

Fedora

Used linux for 4 years now, I’ll list it and the reason why I switched

• Ubuntu (snaps, etc)

• arch (too much setup)

• opensuse (nvidia drivers don’t get checked for size, broke my GUI many times

• Gentoo (too much compile time)

• bazzite (a bit boring)

• fedora atomic (immutable, can’t get mullvad on it), still use on my htpc

• mint (cinnamon DE is shit)

• endeavour (its still arch)

• fedora regular

Archlinux. The wiki and forums are comprehensive, occasional issues I create easy to google, surprisingly reliable. AUR makes it easy to install third-party software.

For the above mentioned reasons, I would recommend you go with one of the big 3: Debian, Fedora, or Arch. Most other distros are either derived from one of the 3 anyways, or are niche.