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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.
For my gaming PC, I've got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I'd either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I'd just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I'm doing on there
openSUSE Tumbleweed. I've tried switching to Aurora and Bazzite, but ended up using openSUSE again and now I love it even more.
EDIT: Typos.
EDIT 2: I also love tinkering with Void and Alpine on VMs.
Debian and Linux Mint.
Debian for mission critical stuff like servers or things I don't want to futz with, like HTPCs, work machines, etc.
Mint for my gaming desktop because it's a bit newer on kernels and such.
Debian Testing. It isn't "recommended" but it works fine.
Obviously if you want AUR you need an Arch variant, in which case just pick Arch.
Edit: I needed the why, it's up to date enough for me and I know apt well.
NixOS & OpenWRT are my two. NixOS’s Nix language as declarative config is such a great tool for setting up & maintaining a machines for the long-term that despite the initial learning curve has paid off in the long run (Guix or a Nix successor should also be in the same category). OpenWRT is the purpose-built tool it is for having an OS for a router with low overhead & a UI that can be easier to understand the config when networking isn’t something you do on the regular.
Fedora Kinoite. I like KDE, atomic distros and the fact that Fedora is the only (at the least that I know of) distro that has proper SELinux implementation.
I also play games on this system, so having newer kernel and Mesa versions also help.
Plain old Fedora.
I know the hurdles, i know what to expect, and I've never been surprised by it.
Immutable sounds nice, AUR sounds nice, NixOS sounds nice, but i am utterly confident in my current choice's reliability and comfortable with its idiosyncracies. Everything i want to do works very well.
If i had less time/energy or had to switch, Kubuntu would be my second choice. Less frequent updates and fewer creature comforts, but also very reliable.
I'm in the same boat. I was a kde neon person for a very long time, but I eventually got tired of some weird issues I was having that I couldn't find a fix for. tried fedora on a bit of a whim and everything just worked. Nvidia drivers were a breeze to set up, gnome is very nice out of the box and doesn't take the configuring I'm used to on kde, and even just having gnome boxes pre installed is super useful and I get to skip the virtualboxes setup. very impressed with it overall. never going back
from the comments, there's a split between
i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it's not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want
Bazzite, I want my PC to just work and not require me to maintain it, on top of that I need it to be game-ready and have good color management for work related stuff.
EndeavourOS. It's just easy to install and I basically use it like Arch
NixOS because it's the only usable stab at sustainable system configuration.
Mint pleb on desktop because it's stable and just works, bazzite on steam deck for installing my own games.
No Void here?
Oh well... I surely don't use it because it's popular...
I went into void as my first DIY distro, mainly because I wanted to mess around with window managers and it was a very good experience. Runit made my underpowered laptop boot into linux in like 4 seconds, crazy fast. XBPS package manager was always really really fast too. I like the fact that nearly everything you need is in the official repo, instead of having to delve into the depths of something like the AUR. I also managed to make a contribution to the repos with the help of the community on the IRC chat rooms which were very noob friendly. Overall just a solid experience.
I recently installed OpenSuse, I have been using FreeBSD mostly, but have used linux through the years. I decided to go with an rpm based distro and I've always likes the chameleon mascot of Suse. I'm used to Debian based linux, so it's been a slight adjustment but it's been nice and smooth. I'm running Tumbleweed right now and all my Steam games work, as well as my 3d Windows applications via wine. It just works* I am too old and tired to spend time tweaking anymore.
At work a mix of red hat, fedora, centos, and red hawk. At home mint debian spin. It just works and games run great. I don't have time to deal with the red hat crap if i'm not getting paid.
Stock Fedora Silverblue. It does what I need so I can get on with my life.
I just installed Pop!_OS 22.04, after finally ditching Windows 11 entirely. I picked it because it seemed easy to use, well suited for gaming, and popular with good support.
So far, everything has been great!
Ubuntu because I'm old, uncool, and tired
I use Arch with Hyprland because it's great.
Bazzite (with KDE). My desktop is mostly for discord and gaming - I don't have the kind of job that can be done from home. So when I get to use it I want it to just work, and look good.
I've used a bunch of distros and I've sort of become an atomic evangelist. Which put like that sounds like a great band name.
Linux Mint, because I don't like to tinker with the system, I like good defaults (and Mints has them).
PopOS. It was the easiest to get my Nvidia GPU set up and plays all the games that I wanna play without too much pain. I've been meaning to try something like Arch with KDE, something like what my SteamDeck is using... but I don't wanna fuck around setting up Arch.
Fedora Silverblue
What do people use for command line utilities? The selection on flatpak is a bit sparse
EndeavorOS. Because I wanted to have a rolling release distribution that is always up to date, and one that is good supported by maintainers and community. Good documentation is very important to me. And I trust the team behind EndeavorOS and Archlinux.
Also the manual approach of many things and the package manager based on Archlinux is very nice. I also like the building of custom packages that is then installed with the package manager (basically my own AUR package). The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.
What do you mean by personal package manager?
Kubuntu, because when I got my Vega 56 GPU on release day (August 14, 2017), I had to download the proprietary driver straight from AMD to get it working, and Ubuntu was the only distro supported by both it and Steam at the time. (Otherwise, I would've picked Debian or Mint.)
I don't love Ubuntu (especially how they push Snap), but I can't be bothered with the hassle of reinstalling my OS.
Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I've used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I'm comfortable with it and it's supported in every cloud environment I've touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)
I've got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I'd go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don't find much of a difference beyond package management.
Debian on most my machines. Can’t trust commercially backed distros any more. I’m tired of chacing cutting edge stuff. Like things to just work.
Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.
edit: typos
NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.
Arch because it helped me understand the os better and i like tinkering. Also pacman and the aur
Devuan because I don't like systemd
After quite a bit of agonizing, I eventually landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I chose a rolling release distro because on my desktop I want to be up-to-date. Having used Gentoo a long time ago, I didn't want a distro that takes effort to install and set up. openSUSE is somewhat popular with an active community and decent documentation in case I run in to issues. I also considered the fact it's based in Germany, because EU has at least some decent privacy laws. I was put off by the fact its backed by SUSE, but that's a two-edged sword.
Right now I'm content with Tumbleweed, but I'm keeping an eye on OpenMandriva Lx if I feel like switching.
I have Bazzite on a laptop for the ease of use and general resistance to breakage, and Spiral Linux in a VM. The latter works flawlessly that way, like it was always meant to be in a VM.