Used Fedora Workstation for 10 years, probably always will if it stays like this. Messing with other distros just feels like work when this is already kinda rules at everything.

Ran Debian stable for about 15 years. Worked great for my needs

Cachyos.

Fedora with the XFCE desktop, had this for almost 5 years and I dont think I will hop Distros agian, I MIGHT go back to KDE but thats a big maybe, XFCE works more than fine for me, so I dont really see a need.

Cinnamon mint. Haven’t really been able to distro hop for a while cuz VMWare workstation pro got paywalled and I haven’t been able to find a decent replacement X( (they used to just use keys that you could find on GitHub but now it’s some bullshit web application login crap and hacking it is beyond me)

Been happy with Debian for a couple years now. After spending time on a few other distros I realized that I really value predictability in my daily driver and don’t really care about most bleeding edge features. My computer does exactly what I expect it to every time I run it, updates don’t randomly break things that were working yesterday, sometimes I have to deal with for example my version of Firefox not supporting something but it seems to me those issues are far less common than the ones I’m dodging.

I used Void Linux for a long time. I put it on my laptop more than 10 years ago and it worked fine. If I ever had a complaint for it, it’s that there is no straightforward way to get a mainstream DE like GNOME or KDE running. You have to set the graphical environment manually. I was using i3 so it wasn’t a problem for me but it makes Void (like Arch) a difficult choice for new users.

After Nvidia support became stable for Wayland, I wanted to switch to a Wayland based environment. But I was not in the mood to set up a desktop from scratch. I looked around and thought I might give CachyOS a try. I liked its installed. It sets up zfs on root automatically and has an option to preconfigured KDE. It worked alright for the most part but I bounced off it eventually for two reasons. One, the pace of updates is just silly. I know that Arch and its derivatives are bleeding edge but having to download a gigabyte of packages after four days of not updating is not something that seems like good practice to me. Once an update broke SDDM but that kind of stuff can just be bad luck. Two, some software just doesn’t work. scanmem and Darktable didn’t work because of segfault and out of bounds memory access respectively. That’s not very rainbow rhythm so I moved on.

Right now I am using Fedora on my laptop and it has been fairly pleasant. I am using Niri with dank material shell and have been liking the experience so far except for inconsistent theming of GTK 3 and 4 and Qt 5 and 6. I was annoyed at first but I am not using graphical applications much these days. All the software works, updates are not as rapid. I also was not able to set up zfs on root because I was not able to find an image with zfs kernel modules included and I wasn’t able to compile the DKMS module in the live image. So I am using the standard btrfs with LUKS encryption setup. It feels good to use a filesystem with first class linux support.

All this while I had been trying out several distros on my Steam Deck as well. I tried cachyos and bazzite but didn’t see much value in using them and came back to SteamOS eventually. My main motivation for trying out third party distros was that I want to be bound by SteamOS’ immutability. But the loss of stability is not worth it because debugging problems in a handheld console without keyboard and mouse is an awful experience. For example, one day in CachyOS the power button stopped working in game mode until an update fixed the problem. SteamOS updates slowly which is perfect for not breaking stuff. The problem I had with SteamOS’ immutability was that it makes it hard to install software. But I have resorted to installing stuff using appimages and statically compiled binaries and it has been great. I am enjoying the stability.

Arch btw, It’s been chugging along for almost 3 years now. I was expecting it to be much more unstable than it actually is, but aside from the occasional broken package upgrade that I need to google for 5 mins and fix, I had no outstanding issues.

I am running NixOS on all my machines and love it. The manual is a bit rough and there can be some small issues, but it makes my life so much easier especially on servers. Would definitely recommend.

I’ve been mainly using Gentoo with i3 and I’ve been having a lot of fun. I’ve also used Arch for about 2 years. NixOS is very interesting and I’d be curious to try it too maybe in the future. I used to use Gnome but I have fallen for WMs especially i3. I tried dwm and while I do like it, I just like i3 a bit more.

I started using Linux mint 18 I think 10 years ago, just got a new comp and Linux Mint 22 is pretty good, works great with almost everything but Ableton and Traktor. Honestly, I just use DeepSeek to guide me through everything, I used to dislike all the work I needed to do but now it’s kinda fun.

I think my setup is vanilla, but Arch on PC and Debian on my home server. I’ve been wanting to try an immutable distro, especially an Arch-based one, but am satisfied enough with my setup that I haven’t bothered doing the research yet

Edit: also, about NixOS, I’ve been fascinated by it too, and wanted to install it on my latest PC, but ended up going with Arch because it’s what I know and life has been too demanding for me to devote the time Nix deserves .

Been running Fedora for over 20 years. Two PCs with Workstation and a laptop with Silverblue as a trial. I go hopping on the laptop on occasion, but always end up back at Fedora. I’m one of those weirdos who actually likes Gnome, and no one integrates it better than Fedora. A little nervous over the whole systemd and age verification brohaha, but I’ll wait to see how things settle out. I also thought the sky was falling when IBM bought RedHat, but that turned out to be a nothing burger, as far as Fedora was concerned. I’m also anticipating Gnome 50 on the next release.

kde neon, i love it.

I’m very basic. I ran mint for the longest time on my desktop, and now I run Ubuntu on an old surface laptop. I’m lazy about tinkering but hate windows enough that when I got my hands on a secondhand surface, I just looked up what distro would be easiest to set up compatibility with the touch screen and all that. It seems to run fine for what I need it for. It’s got 2gb of ram so I only use it for reading writing, nothing crazy.