Linux

I use Mint, with little customization.

Mint basically gets out of my way, I care about the ability to get my work done.

I also prefer the windows paradigm rather than the Mac paradigm. IMHO Mint does it better than windows now.

Arch because it just works once you set it up (yeah, paradoxically), and both AUR and the official repos are fresh yet reliable

I use arch with kde with very little modification apart from changing wallpapers and taskbar stuff to make it more windows like. I'm a boring guy who still can't get away from the Windows feel

I’m old and not keen on tinkering around anymore, that’s why I use Linux Mint Cinnamon. It just works and doesn’t take much time to maintain.

I also use openSUSE Tumbleweed for the same reasons as you. In my case I also like the security configuration that openSUSE has (SELinux+Firewalld) and its snapshot restore tool in case of failure (snapper). I think openSUSE is one of the distributions that enforces security the most as soon as you install the system and to maintain that security I try to install only the software I need and I try not to add external repositories. I would like to try Aeon because I think it is a more security-focused distro but I still need to dual-boot with Windows to connect to my work and Aeon doesn't allow this. In short, I use Tumbleweed as it comes out of the box and just add the packman repository. Many people think that Linux is free of malware and viruses and install many programs from aur, obs, external repositories,... without thinking that they are giving root access to code of dubious origin.

I started with Puppy Linux because I wanted to try Linux, and my 350MHz Celeron with 160MB of RAM and 4GB of disk space (of which I had around 1GB free) wasn't enough to run neither any flavor of the major distros, nor any remotely recent version of Windows that wasn't XP stripped down to the bare minimum, and even that ran like shit. This was around 2008.

After being able to afford a more recent machine (3GHz Intel something Dual Core, with 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDD), I switched to vanilla Ubuntu, with its Unity DE, then Xfce4.

I've been using the LUbuntu flavor (LXDE) since it is more lightweight than the alternatives. Don't really care about bells and whistles now, just a functional and fast desktop.

My most recent laptop is dead now, tho, and I don't see myself getting anything soon :(

Mint Cinnamon. I'm very new to Linux, only switched about a month ago after using Windows for almost 35 years (my first computer was a windows 95).

Really enjoying it so far, and it's actually a fun learning experience.

Because it lets me decide how my computers are supposed to work, instead of some cocaine-fueled asshole manager in Redmond or Cupertino.

I'm a fairly new user to Linux and I first got a laptop with Pop OS since I read that it was a beginner friendly distro and great for gaming. Although I didn't use it for gaming it was great to get to learn how to use Linux and use it for everyday purposes.

Later with lots of trial and error got Fedora Linux working on an old laptop with bad battery life that was lying around. I wanted to try my hand at a bit more of an advanced distro. So far I'm loving both distributions and learning more each day about how things work.

I primarily want something simple I can bend to my will, and secondly I want a good out of the box experience. For me that's been Arch + KDE. The wiki and AUR are great!

I would say every step of the way I just wanted more and more ownership of my system. I make it, I break it. One specific experience which drove me to that camp was the time I had to jailbreak my iPhone and dig through files to disable some deprecated parental control setting... give me ownership over my stuff!

I use whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is on my desktops and usually laptops (besides my Macbook) at the time, and whatever the latest stable Debian release is at the time on my home lab servers.

I am very much a utilitarian and function over form kind of person so I choose what I do because it is the best fit for the problem I was trying to solve, usually with little thought to looks or UI design. I find I don't really care so much how something is done on a given platform, just that there is a way. As a result stuff like theme options, dynamic wallpapers, etc are not something I really care about. I have been using the same black image as my wallpaper on every computer I have used for at least a decade now for example. I arrange the UI in whatever way I feel is the most functional for me within the constraints of what the platform supports out of the box. Meaning I couldn't care less for stuff like the old school Window blinds program and what not.

Ubuntu over Windows because I wanted to get away from the ever increasing ads and general slop that Microsoft was putting into Windows while still retaining some support for gaming(thanks to Valve and Proton) and building my own systems.

Debian on servers over Ubuntu or something RPM based because Debian stable is rock solid and will run whatever you put on it without issue in my experience.

Debian with xfce. Because I'm old. I don't want to change, damnit!

You're being very melodramatic about the whole thing...

It's a computer. We want to use it under our terms. End of story.

I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I'd found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in "Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?" ways, which I didn't want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I'm experimenting with local LLM on it.

I use Arch with KDE Plasma. It just works.

Astrology, but penguin themed.

You are such a Debian.

Arch and Gentoos never got along.

If you are a Nix do not install KDE on the first monday of the month, it's bad luck.

Me with every new Linux installation:

My network looks like George Foreman's kids names.

Anyway I use Ubuntu to make other Linux users mad. Stay mad, nerds.

Honestly, I haven messed with any of this. I just installed Mint, made sure everything works and haven't messed with it since. It's a tool and nothing more. It is also the reason why I left Windows. They were trying to force too many features and ads on something that I didn't want to be more than an operating system

The main customization has been that i added app snap store for the software that I couldn't find in the default software store

I use Fedora with Plasma.

I hate customizing ui elements, so I wanted something that used plasma and looked good with tweaking things.

I don’t want to deal with Snap, so my choices were a bit limited, but I’ve used Fedora in the past and liked it. I still do.

I did try arch with plasma and couldn’t get hardware video decoding to work in the browser, so I switched to Fedora. I was pleasantly surprised that Fedora had so much more configured for my laptop out of the box.

I got tired of windows feeling like my only option. I knew there were alternatives out there so I went searching.

Mint and Kubuntu are both super easy to install and use and I'm glad to help my friends with installing a new OS whenever they ask.

I use Linux because it is free and good enough to do most stuff I want to do on a computer.

I use windows at work because I get paid - so from my perspective it is cheaper than free. It makes it frustrating to do the stuff I'm supposed to do but my employers are fucking idiots so it doesn't really matter.

I used to run SUSE on a laptop i only used once every three years or so. Because of the "full open source" principle i couldn't run a lot of online Videos because the codecs were free but proprietary. When i decided to get a new computer as my tower was getting 15, i wanted to switch to a Linux distro as my daily system. Bought a laptop without windows preinstalled and decided to roll with Manjaro as it has KDE and was recommended as suitable for gaming.

Works fine for the most part. The last wave of updates caused some fuss with the desktop, but i can just do everything important from the terminal, while waiting for the next release.

Windows doesn't have a real choice of desktop environments. So I moved to Linux 15 years ago. I'm not in IT and always use a mouse. Importantly for me, I've never needed the CLI, despite people telling me that's impossible. Plasma lets me tweak it to my needs. I use Kubuntu, yet don't care about what's below the desktop environment. Happy to change distros.

My current main machine uses Fedora KDE because at the time I built the machine and installed the OS, Mint Cinnamon did not have particularly good Wayland support, and I needed Wayland to access certain features of my GPU and monitor combo.

I used Mint Cinnamon for ten solid years on my older machines, Cinnamon is still my favorite distro, I tried a couple early on, Cinnamon just felt like home and I stayed there for a decade. But it was kind of jank on my new machine so I went with KDE.

i decided to install linux mint over windows one weekend and here i am. plus i got sick of microsoft and their continuing quest to be terrible.

I use secureblue, because it offers the (AFAIK unique) intersection between:

• a security-first^[To be precise, it's actually Linux-first and security-second. For an actual security-first approach, consider taking a look at Sculpt OS employed with the seL4 kernel run on ARM or 64-bit RISC-V.] approach while being fit for general computing
• a first-class citizen of the ~~'immutable'~~ reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm
• a well-maintained project with many active contributors that exhibit a proactive stance when it comes to implementing (security) improvements

The only bad OS is one that won't do what you want when you want to do it.

I run a mixed environment at home, Windows machine for work, personal Windows machine for interoperability, Linux on the Steam Deck since that what it comes with, external Windows SSD for the Steam Deck since some games absolutely require Windows, Linux NAS for media, Linux Raspberry Pis for some fun side projects, my wife runs MacOS because she's an Apple Fangirl, Android phone and tablet, iOS work phone for testing. Xbox, Playstation, Switch consoles for gaming.

I use NixOS to document all of the choices I make. I can transfer my whole setup between computers and it just works. I don't have random modifications anywhere

I also use Niri. Previously I basically used maximimized windows on dual monitors. But I really liked the idea of switching to one ultrawide display. Maximized windows wouldn't work well in that setup. Tiling hadn't really worked for me because you end up with a screen full of awkwardly skinny or short windows, or windows hidden away in tabs. I also didn't like the idea of managing floating windows with... a mouse.

So I looked for a better option. I found PaperWM, and I loved it! Exactly what I needed! But it has a number of quirks, being an extension that entirely reworks Gnome's window management. For a long time I wished for a native scrolling wm. And then Niri came along! And it's so polished!

Alpine Linux + LabWC – as I update my hardware, I seem to end up paring down my software – the more powerful the computer is, the less use I make of its capabilities 🤷 – I’ve worked with Macs and Windows, and settled on Linux more for its simplicity than anything – I don’t have any problem with MacOS or Windows themselves so much as the companies behind them

Alpine is a nice, clean, lightweight distro that works surprisingly well on a desktop despite the whingers complaining it’s for containers only … Pop!_OS ⇒ Debian Stable ⇒ Alpine (with Gentoo back in the dawn of history)

LabWC is the spiritual successor to Openbox, a nice simple stacking window manager that I’ve added a handful of tiling keybinds – I’ve added utility programs as I’ve wanted them rather than going for the cohesiveness of a proper desktop environment … Gnome ⇒ Xfce ⇒ LabWC (and with Openbox way back when)

Fedora Kinoite, because it fits my workflow the best and has a nice mixture of stable and leading edge.

Everything I run was containerized either way (Flatpak, Docker or Podman) long before I switched to an immutable distro.

I have lots of different development environments for various versions of different programming languages that are incredibly easy to setup, throw away and recreate with toolbox without having to dive into the language specific tools for creating virtual environments (venv, conda, ...). On regular Linux/Windows systems I end up at a point after a few years where there is junk laying around everywhere from 6 different PHP versions, 7 gcc variants and 8 .NET versions.

I was on Fedora KDE before that and the main reason for choosing it was that Ubuntu/Debian/Mint were too old to include firmware for my GPU. Arch and derivatives are on the opposite side of the spectrum and are too new for my taste, I'm fine with waiting a few weeks for .1 versions to release with bugfixes.

As for why not Bazzite or Aurora: Because I wanted to be as close to the original (Fedora & KDE) as possible. The modifications those distros make (and I need), I can do myself in a few minutes.

I do recommend Bazzite or Aurora for less experienced people though, they have a lot of tweaks that Kinoite is really lacking. Kinoite, just like the Fedora KDE variant has a lot of polishing issues that quickly become gigantic obstacles for beginners (Nvidia drivers, Flathub repository, H264/H265 codecs, missing udev rules, ...)

I had configured a windows/linux mint dual boot a few years ago because I thought it would be a cool and fun thing to do. Flash forward to now, and I'm using the mint OS 99% of the time.

I use either debian with plasma, or mint with cinnamon. Why? Because it fucking works out of the box and I can use my computer. I rarely customize my DE. I usually end up customizing my terminal more.

I run Garuda because it's a more convenient Arch with most relevant things preinstalled. I wanted a rolling release distro because in my experience traditional distros are stable until you have to do a version upgrade, at which point everything breaks and you're better off just nuking the root partition and reinstalling from scratch. Rolling release distros have minor breakage all the time but don't have those situations where you have to fix everything at the same time with a barely working emergency shell.

The AUR is kinda nice as well. It certainly beats having to manually configure/make obscure software myself.

For the desktop I use KDE. I like the traditional desktop approach and I like being able to customize my environment. Also, I disagree with just about every decision the Gnome team has made since GTK3 so sticking to Qt programs where possible suits me fine. I prefer Wayland over X11; it works perfectly fine for me and has shiny new features X11 will never have.

I also have to admit I'm happy with systemd as an init system. I do have hangups over the massive scope creep of the project but the init component is pleasant to work with.

Given that after a long spell of using almost exclusively Windows I came back to desktop Linux only after windows 11 was announced, I'm quite happy with how well everything works. Sure, it's not without issues but neither is Windows (or macOS for that matter).

I also have Linux running on my home server but that's just a fire-and-forget CoreNAS installation that I tell to self-update every couple months. It does what it has to with no hassle.

I use NixOS for the atomic updates that I can roll back to at any time, so I can more or less never completely break my system. And even if I somehow manage it, I can just do a fresh install and apply my flake to get my entire setup back.

The drawback is that it does not follow the filsystem hierarchy standard, so a lot of scripts and binaries does not work out of the box. It gives me quite a bit of friction, but I'm sure that is a skill issue.

My desktop started by being inspired by a lot of Linux YouTubers, and I've gradually modified it to fit my needs.

I'm using Hyprland, Ghostty, neovim (btw), Rofi, waybar.

But, I'll have to check out Niri after reading here.

I have distro hopped like many others. Started out on Ubuntu more than a decade ago. It wasn't something I loved then, or now. But tried a few more along the eayway.

Ultimately, I landed on Arch. I want newest packages available, I like to tinker. And I wanted arch so that I could learn how my OS worked on a deeper level than windows would ever allow me to learn without extra dissection. I swapped from being a windows user directly to Arch.

My first few Arch installs were done by hand, but anytime I reinstall now that I have an understanding, I use the ArchInstall script.

Arch for me is the perfect cross of form, functionality, and up to date with large dash of customizability.

Yes, I am familiar with what Gentoo is, but never delved into using it. The next "leap" or discovery I am going to invest time into is Nix.