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Windows, it's easy to set up all the games I want and I'd have to run an emulator to use a Linux distro and still play everything I want to.
The last version I paid for was Windows 7 however, I only took the Win10 upgrade when things slowly stopped working because of driver issues.
Windows. Primarily because I play a lot of PC games and do PCVR and while Linux has come a long way it's still more of a PITA to use for a lot of things.
I'm using Ubuntu with KDE Plasma. A while ago, Windows reset a lot of my system (thank the powers that be that my files stayed intact), and I decided that I was fed up with Windows and that I'd find a way to continue everything I was doing on Linux. At this point, I'm roughly 95% of the way there as I do own an Oculus Rift which only supports Windows (unless someone can point me to an article or forum post that says otherwise); I'd like to either get a Valve Index or a Quest, but I don't currently have the money.
In any case, a friend of mine recommended a flavor of Arch that included KDE Plasma (I forget the name, might be Endeavour) but I was coming up with issues that a lot of programs I had wanted to use were only built for Debian/Ubuntu so I switched again. Lovely how with Linux you can switch distros so easily. So I flashed my computer with Kubuntu and I haven't looked back since.
KDE Neon. It does everything I expect an OS to do and stays out of my way...
QubesOS (with Debian and Whonix AppVMs) or TAILS
Desktop: Fedora Laptop: Arch
Both use KDE, though I've also played around with i3/sway/hyprland on my laptop.
I used to have Windows on a separate partition, then on a separate hard drive... Once I realized I hadn't booted into it in months I got rid of it completely and haven't looked back.
Gaming was one of my last tethers and it's gotten so good in recent years that at most I only need to do some minor setup and tweaking, if that. Proton ,Vulkan, and DXVK have really made it all possible.
Windows 10. I got a Ryzen 5900x that works fine on an old bios version. Upgrading to windows 11 requires me to upgrade the bios or get tTPM stutters. However, the new bios versions reduce the (single core) performance...So I'm sticking with windows 10 for now. I have windows 11 on my laptop and don't mind it. Tried Linux multiple times over the past 15 years, but it always kills itself within weeks. As a server it works well though.
Windows 11 on my gaming desktop because it's still difficult to beat in gaming workloads (although Valve is doing promising things with SteamOS along with the advancements in Proton and Wine) . macOS on my school laptop due to the battery life and great developer tools along with it's integration with iPhone/Airpods. Arch on my project laptop because it can run almost anything I can download off of Github and it has a great software library with the AUR. I'm not really loyal to any operating system, I just use what I think is the right tool for the job.
Windows 10, mainly because two factors: I use a lot of macros on office at work, and Clip Studio Paint... But I'm considering going full Linux once Windows 10 goes EoL, since CSP is going with their subscription model I plan on using Krita. I just need to see if I can use my work files with office+wine
Gentoo gang
Trying to balance all the libraries and programs I need for ham radio, astronomy, CAD/CAM, emulation (VMs and consoles), containers, gaming, flight simulation, and software development basically requires the granularity of fine tuning it provides.
I use arch btw ๐
But fr, between the regular pacman repos, the aur, and flatpak, I can easily get just about any piece of sofware I could ever want with almost no exceptions. Other distros are definitely getting closer, but it seems like arch has always been the undisputed king here. I also like how rolling release means everything is always up to date and I don't have to mess with a major "system upgrade" potentially breaking things.
AUR is the most compelling reason for me to try out Arch to be honest (and also Arch Wiki). I'm thinking that I might compromise and go for EndeavourOS.
I dual boot Windows and Arch Linux. I only keep Windows around for some games that don't work in Linux currently, as well as the occasional software that doesn't have a Linux equivalent (or the equivalent has issues such as compatibility) though. Mostly everything else is done in Linux, and I'm quite happy with it!
As for the "why" on Linux, I've always loved interacting in a CLI environment, and enjoy the dev experience on Linux. And as cliche as it sounds, I do like "owning" my system and feeling like I actually get to make executive decisions as to how/what it runs.
Using openSUSE Tumbleweed on my main PC. Works very well for my use; probably my favorite rolling release distro.
My daily driver is a MacBook but I have other machines running Windows and Pop! OS (System 76)
Debian Testing with XFCE. When I need Wayland (for testing my app), i use Sway.
update-alternatives and synaptic. Also, it breaks less often, provided the system is used properly.Also, I use Debian Stable on a VPS, because you don't want to sacrifice security to bleeding edge.
* tips Fedora*
GNU Guix System. 100% free software, focus on reproducible builds, declarative configuration, packages are just Scheme modules stored in a git repository. I've written packages for guix (I helped with the Icedove package) and find it to be fairly straightforward once I understood the syntax and basic data structures.
One particularly nifty feature of guix is that you can specify a commit or version number to build a package with, so if the package is out of date you can still get the latest version (assuming it still builds of course).
Windows 10 bc I play lots of games and it just runs. Not upgrading to Windows 11 bc I want to reinstall my PC when I do it but I don't want to do all that at the moment.
Windows 11. VR sim racing isn't good on Linux yet.
Arch > anything else.
manjaro and win11 for some obscure things I need it for.
There's a lot I love about Linux, and when I ran a potato computer and ran my own business and had a PS2/3/4 for gaming, Linux was awesome. Got into Destiny back in the D1 days so when I built a PC in 2020 I definitely wanted to play D2, which meant I had to run Windows. By that point I had also been running Windows at work because I need a lot of Adobe and Excel so it wasn't too bad to switch.
I have one desktop running windows 11 home and one laptop running Ubuntu 22.04. I use windows 11 for gaming and some windows stuff, and Ubuntu as my daily drive. The reason I use ubuntu is simple, It's a tradeoff between new software and stability especially with my stupid nvidia graphic card. I tried Manjaro too, but sometimes after I updated the gnome DE, gnome-shell just somehow stutter and leak.
I have a lot of PCs for different purposes, so this answer could probably be considered cheating. It really depends on what I am doing. I'll go in order of Highest usage to Least usage, and separate professional usage and personal usage.
Personal
Professional
I'm not going to list every computer here, so I'll just categorize them by purpose.
I personally find Operating Systems to be situational. I wouldn't say one is really better than the other. However, I've been moving away from Windows for personal use lately, as I've been getting more and more frustrated with the overall user experience. I know that custom shells for Windows exist, but I don't know how good of an idea it is to use them.
Depends. My laptop has Windows 10 as a backup, but runs current Linux mint w/cinnamon DE
My desk pc is on Windows 7, with a secondary drive I can boot from that's tuning running mint as well.
The household pc is running debian w/plasma because my wife likes it better than cinnamon. I tried mint on it, and gor whatever reason, it didn't "like" mint but debian works fine.
There's also the old PC I used to use as my writing computer. It's running debian with xfce because it doesn't get used by anyone else, and it's slow as hell with plasma or cinnamon. I don't really use it much, but nobody wanted the damn thing, so I keep it set up for the occasions when I need to be able to lock a door so I'm not interrupted. Which is when I have writer's block, not the other thing lol.
Fedora 36 on both my desktop and laptop. (that's GNU/Linux). Its not the latest because I have outdated hardware. Occasionally dual booth Windows for Valorant and FL Studio.
As to why. I enjoy an Operating System where I can change everything. For me this is Linux. I customize to the point where everything works then I don't touch it. I used to be obsessed with changing stuff. But this way I have it the way I like it. If anyone is curious, go check out !unixporn@lemmy.ml
Void Linux on my Thinkpad and Thinkstation. On Pinephone and Pinetab I'm running postmarketOS. I really like postmarketOS and using apk, so if I were to get a new laptop or every change the distro on my laptop or desktop, then I might try Alpine. On raspberry pi 3, it's raspbian. I use that mainly to run pi-hole and pivpn.
I distro hopped for a little while, but then settled on Void. It does what I need and was easy to get set up how I want. It's a rolling release and I haven't ever had any big issues with upgrading. The worst issue I've had was when they recently removed pipewire-media-session and switched to wireplumber. After checking a couple posts on reddit and on void's documentation, I got it set up the recommended way without any trouble and audio is working fine.
edit: wanted to add that my Thinkpad also has OpenBSD as a dual boot option, but I haven't booted into it in a long time. One day I'd like to try a BSD as a server(not on a laptop, of course.) Also, the Thinkstation has Windows 10/Void dual boot, but I never boot into Windows.
Mac. I tried linux and while the future is promising, I had too many things go poorly for me to fully adopt it at the moment. Windows has been going downhill for a long time now, but I think windows 11 is the true point of no return. So I use mac, which feels like a nice middle ground between the two in terms of features, usability, etc.
Fedora, because it works well out of the box, and I like GNOME.