I currently use pop-os which is an Ubuntu derivative. I use it because it works well, is easy, and it’s smoother than Ubuntu. My second choice would be Kubuntu if I wanted to commit to KDE. My reasons are that I’m doing important business on all my computers and I don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot things that don’t work. So I stick to the LTS releases nowadays.

A downside of my approach is that it’s less customizable, not as up to date and slightly constraining.

Over the years I have used a lot of different distributions. I’ve had many success and even more failures.

So many people have strong feelings about their favorite distros. The big differences are about ease of installation and configuration, stability, open source vs. proprietary code, community support and ability to customize. Other than that, they are all basically Linux.

Arch is not for the faint of heart but it is awesome if you can get it installed. And they have a great support community. There are a lot of Arch variants that are easier to install.

I like lizard, i use tumbleweed

I made the switch a few days ago. At the moment I’m running a dual boot setup as unfortunately I can’t completely drop Windows for work sessions. I settled on Linux Mint as I couldn’t get Nobara (a fedora fork or sth) to run stable.

I have no experience with Linux (except for owning a steam deck and using live CDs some years ago), so I was looking for sth simple and able to run games.

I’ve been doing more tweaking than I thought but that’s mainly due to my hardware, e.g. getting the stream deck and the rodecaster to run. I’ve learned a bunch of stuff while tinkering with all of this and I can recommend Linux Mint due to its ease of use and very large community where someone probably had your exact problem before and even documented it in some way.

Can’t say much about other distros but I don’t think I’ll switch to another any time soon.

I have a tendency to use “DIY” systems, basically systems that leave the administration up to me, and either have a minimal base or a customizable, powerful but convenient installer. Then comes the package manager’s strengths and weaknesses, and the package repository and its release cycles.

My favorite OSes of all are:

• NixOS
• FreeBSD
• Arch/Endeavour
• Debian
• To some extend Alpine

I never used Gentoo so I don’t classify it, but i believe I would like it a lot if I used it.

And yeah, I have a logo bias lmao. NixOS, FreeBSD and Debian have amazing logos. Something that is neat is when a distro has multiple kernel versions in the repository.

I used Fedora on my laptop for like 4 years. It came with gnome, and was very stable. I didn’t know a lot about Linux at the time, but it treated me well.

Eventually, I was learning graphics and the mesa drivers in fedora’s repos were lacking specific OGL support I wanted to try out. I tried installing mesa from source, but it didn’t go very smoothly.

This is when I learned about arch’s rolling release model. I ran antergos for a while, then manjaro, and now endeavor, and more recently I’ve heard arch has a fancy installer wizard so I might just do that next.

I would still recommend Fedora (or Mint) as someone’s first go at Linux. I don’t think you need to try arch until you know why you’re using it.