Linux

Don't yell but Fedora/Ubuntu was my first exposure to Linux so I'm prejudiced toward them. I didn't have a lot of exposure to 'nix in the 90s since the family only had Windows.

openSuse. After my years of distro hopping ended over a decade ago I settled on openSuse Leap and never switched to something else again. It's reliable and gives me the least bullshit. And by now it's the one I have the most experience in.

//edit
Leap on my server and tumbleweed on my work laptop but Leap would be sufficient there, too.

draft - am I allowed to type "chromeos"

I use Arch because it is generally the easiest one I've found to pretend it's 2010 again. Most Linux distributions are fine, but they've all been busy trying to solve problems I don't have and accepting that some niche corner cases are fine to break. I'm just a niche corner case in general.

I have nothing against Wayland trying to modernize the UI stack, but if their answer to half the things I need is "well the compositor should do that" and the compositor doesn't in fact do that yet, then I don't want to use Wayland yet. I have nothing against Flatpak trying to modernize application packaging, but their current story for making applications available from a shell is effectively "why do you want to do that", and well...I do want to do that, so I guess I don't really want to use Flatpak yet.

That's just me. Like I said...I'm a corner case. I understand that everyone else wants their computer to be an appliance that does what most people need without requiring any tinkering. And I'm not opposed to getting rid of the need to tinker. I'm too old to view tinkering to make something work as I think I look forward to. I just view tinkering as a one-time cost with perpetual returns. I'm OK editing an xkb file to make some obscure input device work the way I want it to, because that might take me an afternoon, and then I just have that device do exactly what I want for the rest of its life with no further effort. Make it so that I never have to edit another xkb file again and I'll be just fine. But you can't do it by just saying, "no more needing xkbcomp because it doesn't work anymore, and if you needed it, go see if the compositor vendor will write some code for you".

Solus - get updates all the time, don't have to think about reinstalling and don't have to pay attention if an update could break my system

Anything Arch, because it's hard, it's a pain in the ass and as an intermediate user I need Arch to break on me so I can fix it and learn.

mint for my laptop running awesomewm and lightened it up a bit - To have a no-thrills always works never complaints machine.

fedora server edition plus awesomewm for my desktop

Fedora, although I dislike SELinux and I think they should have a less strict policy with regards to FLOSS. Like, I prefer FLOSS over proprietary software, but I just wish they'd be a bit more pragmatic and allow both on the default repos and just leave it up to the user to decide what to use and what not. I guess that would also prevent dilemmas like the recent hardware acceleration drama?

Otherwise I like their balance between stability and being up to date, fast update cycle and the large amount of available packages.

Daily drive Gnentoo, not sure if I could ever wholeheartedly recommend it since it's not really accessible for beginners...

If I need a VM I'd probably spin up an Arch or Alpine since they are relatively minimal & are not that difficult to set up once you're familiar with stuff (well Arch is one-command setup now). For servers... pretty much Debian always since that's what everyone supports

Stability-wise... I guess it depends on what type of "stability" I want? If I meant stability by having stable programming environments then it's not compatible with having new updates, Debian probably would be best for that. If I meant stability by the system not breaking too often, then most rolling release distros are probably fine? Arch/Gentoo have a lot more room for user error which is probably where most of the instability comes from, but otherwise they typically don't have too many issues I believe. Fedora is great but there's been some issue with RHEL going close-source, so I guess some ppl won't want to support that endeavor

Arch Linux. Because... it's rock n' rolling!

I use manjaro, if you like the up-to-dateness of arch, with the polish and ease of setup of popos, it may be a great candidate for you.

I love Kubuntu. Plasma reminds me of windows 10 layout which I prefer over the windows 11/ Mac drawer layout.

Manjaro - because everyone else seems to only be voting for Arch itself here. Manjaro is actually very stable, but I did sometimes have some trouble with AUR updates clashing. I like it because it stays relatively up to date and I don't have to do any major reinstalls or upgrades. I've been on it for a few years and never have lost data or was not able to get it started (even if it did need a manual kick-start once or twice). Like any distro, over time you become savvy around what to use and what to avoid.

This is what I drive too, at work we have RHEL though, and we're required to use RHEL base images for our containers. UBI-minimal is small enough though

The blue A-shaped logo distro just clicked for me. Don't think I'll ever get tempted to wander.