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

Arch because I like simple.

Other distros are an exercise in patience I think. Each Ubuntu version has different names and versions of stuff like docker, mysql and everything else. It's really annoying to work with. I assume all six month distros are like that. And you have to add extra repos, keys and whatnot for it to even find things.

With arch, since it's rolling, I just install the latest version and I already know the command. It's always the same. Always.

There are many reasons I like arch but the simplicity of the installations is one of my favorite reasons to use it, and the fact that it's always the latest version.

If you're looking for stable and up to date, give openSUSE Tumbleweed a shot.

Debian for servers and debian for desktop. Debian everywhere!

For the past six years it has been Kubuntu, but I think it's time to finally abort Canonical and their idiosyncrasies and choose Debian as a KDE base, especially now that Debian 12 includes non-free firmware by default.

mint
it "just works" and I dont have to update it constantly

but my daily driver is endeavourOS

Debian for my work. It is stable and I’ve been using it for many years.

Fedora! To me it sits right at the sweet spot of stability and bleeding edge (they call it "leading edge"), and I'm very happy with how they run things (including the most recent controversy!).

Fedora, really uptodate software, GNOME, stability of a server distro.

Arch Linux is my go-to distro because I can literally install it in half the time that it takes a lot of others. I also like that it is very lightweight.

Currently NixOS having been a long time Arch user. The power of Nix is unbeatable once it finally clicks.

Debian -- The Universal Operating System

Because it's universal, runs on everything rock solid and stable.

Debian stable, the os for 50 year old nudists.

It’s the stable branch of one of the oldest distributions around.

Endeavour OS for me, use it both on my own laptop and my work one. BTW, it's Arch-based

Try Void Linux, or just stay at Arch. If you want to try Nixos (my current distro), watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y .

Nixos, as stable as debian and as rolling edge as arch and if i break something i can just rollback.

I've always felt that Arch has the least amount of personal compromises. For "bleeding edge," it's also generally stable and has a wealth of community support and documentation.

I would highly recommend EndeavourOS. Its basically Arch linux on easy mode. It takes care of updates without much fuss.

Fedora.

I can highly recommend fedora to a newbie. It's easier to use than ubuntu. It doesn't come with snaps. You only need one or two methods of installing apps. It's safe. It's well written. It's supported very well. It's updated frequently. It incorporates innovative technology.

Opensuse and EndeaverOS are also very nice.

Arch for desktop, Debian for server

For desktop Linux, I use Arch. It's a community driven base distribution, so the needs of the community are what drives development and there are no financial decisions of a company that get priority, which is refreshing. It also has access to the latest and greatest that Linux has to offer.

They have a philosophy of expecting basic effort from users and to have a tinkering mindset. Historically, Arch devs and users have a reputation of being grumpy greybeards, but many of the rough edges have been rounded off in the last few years. If you are willing to do a bit of reading or watching some YouTube videos, it's not really that hard.

You can really build a lean and powerful machine that has just the software you want on the system with Arch. All it takes is a little effort and willingness to ask for help from the community after you have tried and failed to solve problems yourself. It's really not the badge of elitism to use Arch in 2023. It's never been easier to use and doesn't blow up on you nearly as often as the reputation implies. Just use good hygiene and make snapshots so if you blow it up, it's only a 5 minute recovery.

Arch and Debian. I have two home PCs with all my data on an smb share. One runs Debian 12, the other runs Arch. When I sit down I decide which I want to use and go. I couldn't pick one I liked better so....I didn't.

Arch has been my go to for almost 10 years now, and it was one of my favorites for 5 years prior. These days I rarely have any issues from updating. I have to use Ubuntu for work and I dread every distribution upgrade. I got lucky and the last one worked on my work laptop, but usually something stupid breaks.

I run arch on my laptop, my previous laptop, and my server. The install on my server is 7 years old now, and started life with an entirely different CPU brand. I won't say I've never had to do any manual intervention, but the answer has been a Google search away pretty much every time.

I use Arch BTW

Mint. Simple, stable, efficient.

Pop! It's easy to install, stable, and works great with Nvidia drivers. If I have more time on my hands then Arch, because it's good old-fashioned computing fun.

Fedora Workstation is what I use for my desktop. If I were to have to reinstall now I'd do Silverblue.

For my home lab I do Proxmox with a couple of VM's for Ubuntu server for pihole DNS servers and an OpenMediaVault VM for my docker workloads. I'd probably do CoreOS or IoT if I was starting over there though.

Debian. I've been running it on my "daily driver" personal desktop/laptop since -97 (Debian 1.3).
Changing now would be major undertaking with no apparent upside, so I won't.

Tried a lot of distros and finally settled on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Rock solid for a rolling release. If anything ever goes wrong, there's Snapper to rollback without a breaking a sweat.

@pluja You'll be happiest using whatever you're comfortable maintaining/troubleshooting. I've spent ~20 years playing with many different distros for one reason or another and the only one I can't stay away from is #gentoo. As with most things, everyone's got different tastes, that's the great thing about having so much choice.

Nobody's reason for "the best" distro is gonna be the right one for you. You'll know what's right for you because it's the one you always want to use more than any other.

Currently kinda controversial, but currently it's still Fedora, the xfce4 version.

I had Debian for some time before, but had my apt packages messed up a couple of times to the point I had to entirely re-install. In stable, I was missing sufficiently recent versions, in testing I had other problems.

With Fedora dnf I had less problems recovering, usually more recent versions.

Xfce4 is just more suitable for my needs than Gnome.

Gentoo and Debian. Debian will let you get back to what you really want to be doing whereas gentoo gives you excellent granularity over everything, but can be overwhelming and time consuming.

Really should ask yourself what you'll be mostly doing and pick a tool (distro) that let's you accomplish that.

i settled on fedora kde a few years ago(altho i recently switched to fedora silverblue kde)
imo a nice middleground.

if you are intrested in immutable distros, i can recommend silverblue (not as drastic of a change compared to nixos)

if you are intrested in nixos package management, you might want to try out the nix package manager on your current distro.

an intresting way to get the fresh but stable system you want is to,
install some rock solid distro like debian,
and then use the nix package manager and/or flatpacks to get the fresh software you want.

I use Pop!_OS on my desktop and laptop. Prior to that, I would distro-hop like it was my job. I bought a system76 laptop and figured, why not. So, I had Pop preloaded on it instead of Ubuntu. Here's the reason I ended up settling on Pop as my one-and-only distro.

• Based off Ubuntu/Debian, which I am most familiar/comfortable with
• No Snaps
• Flatpak supported out of the box
• Relatively rapid deployment of updated kernels (currently on 6.2.6), so no need to worry about hardware support
• Tiling windows that are well implemented
• Backed by a company, but one that shares the same values as me
• Stable, even with semi-rolling release nature of it

The downsides are that their choice of colors are god-awful. I get it, it's their company's colors, but I don't think it looks really all that good on an operating system. I've gotten used to it, and don't care as much anymore.

I use arch btw

Arch Linux because k.i.s.s

Unpopular opinion: Antix Linux for workstation, because:

1. It's Debian
2. Very lightweight (100mb on RAM)
3. Live to RAM
4. Frugal installation
5. Small size ISO (1gb) with full function utility
6. Flexibel recovery, from old to modern system
7. Responsive (no systemd)
8. Retro-kind WM (icebox-wm), perfectly match on retro system

Gentoo, for its user choice and lack of bloat. I've been using it for a long time, and can create my own packages for personal use if I don't mind them looking like Frankenstein bodges, so that's another plus. It's stable enough if you stick with actual stable-marked packages and don't go out of your way to shoot yourself in the foot, and if something does go wrong at the distro's end, 1. they usually fix it pretty fast and 2. rolling packages back is easy if the older version is still in the tree (and usually still possible if it isn't, although it can get kind of involved).

Would I recommend Gentoo to another user? That depends on which user. You kind of have to be either knowledgeable or willing to learn—it isn't a "just works" distro, although some things have been streamlined in recent years. You do have to put a little time into maintenance, but it's usually on the order of less than half an hour a week.

It used to be Fedora, and I still want it to be Fedora. It was solid, stable, cutting edge, and easy to work with both on the command line and in the super-up-to-date Gnome desktop. DNF is great once you make a few tweaks, I don't care about systemd, and it supports all of my hardware with basically no tweaking right out of the box. And the Anaconda Installer isn't all that bad once you get used to its idiosyncrasies. I've been a distrohopper for like 15 years now, but I always end up hopping back to Fedora. Or I did, anyway, but with IBM-RedHat's shenanigans as of late, I'm looking for a new home. Current thoughts:

• I used to run Arch (btw), and could go back to it, but I'd prefer something more brainless to maintain (Arch isn't hard to maintain - check updates before you install, be careful with the AUR, it's golden - but I just don't have the spoons anymore). It's actually what I'm running on the laptop I'm using to post this.

• I'm not going to use Ubuntu or anything else involving Snap because I hate dealing with Snap (YMMV - I know it has its fans, but I don't like the way Canonical is handling it's stuff there, and I only have room in my depression-addled brain for one universal package format).

• I love the new Debian, but the Gnome desktop is already out of date, and it's just going to get farther behind. I have to decide if I want to give up cutting edge Gnome in favor of holy-Mary-Mother-of-God stability.

• Some up and coming immutables look very interesting; blendOS and Vanilla OS in particular, but also OpenSuse Aeon. Just not sure I'm ready to go immutable, old grognard that I am.

But seriously, RHEL - just re-open the source code, thanks, you asshats.

Edit: I really need to learn how to proofread before I post.

Mint for work and home.

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.

I distro hopped a lot in the 2006-2011 era, and eventually settled on Arch. I like the initial simplicity, the wiki was and still is the best resource to this day, and anything I needed from the kitchen sink was accessible via the AUR. I've ended up using it on my workstations, work laptops, and personal machines ever since.

If I had to choose, I'd go with openSUSE Tumbleweed. It's a solid distro overall. Arch, Debian and Mint are close though! I've been thinking to check out NixOS and Garuda for a while, but I haven't had the time for that yet.

zorin. im just so lazy. Every so often I try something else looking for something easier. I would really like to use cubeos but likely not going to happen. oh and sourcemage and maybe once im retired.

Used to be Arch, now I shill for Debian.

Void Linux. Super stable and offers an easy and lightning fast package manager. I'm not sure of your use case but it has been great for me on an older Dell precision laptop for work.

EndeavourOS and quite happy with it.

Arch for me, I use Aur as a crutch to avoid compiling and managing source projects, i love pacman and rolling releases, and it's very easily customizable (ofc once you learn the system).

Debian is always my go-to. Is the users are coming from Windows I might say the DE to Cinnamon.

Fedora because it's robust, stable, mature and has a fairly up-to-date package repository. Plus, it has spins (ISO flavours) with different DEs/WMs installed, including i3 and even Sway!

If you want a Linux distro that just works and gets out of the way, Fedora is for you. I've been using it for years now and see no reason to switch.

You tried most of them. You found Arch enjoyable, so I'd stick to that for the Wiki, the community, and flexibility.

NixOS looks interesting too, but nothing beats Arch in terms of having so much software at one-click distance with the almighty AUR.

If you are looking for stability with latest updates, then Gentoo. But I won't recommend it to a distro hopper.

Besides than Arch and Mint are my general recommendation.

It depends on how you want your update cycle.

If you don't mind the rolling release type of updates where you get updates ASAP, EndeavourOS does the job nicely. It's based on Arch Linux like Manjaro, but unlike Manjaro it only uses its own repository for its own, distro-specific extra software, everything else is from Arch's repos. If you remember Antergos, it's basically the spiritual successor.

For those who want a stable update cycle, I would recommend either Linux Mint or Fedora. I've had a solid experience with Fedora, but my friends really like Mint as well.

For those who want to be able to mix and match stable and unstable packages, Gentoo is the way to go. The nature of its package management allows you to mix and match stable and unstable versions at your own leisure, at the cost of long compilation times. It depends on whether that's worth it for you, but it's worth mentioning.

Void linux, but if you're somewhat savvy and don't mind spending some time fixing your flow in the beginning, Gentoo/Funtoo is a nice flex

I have been a Linux user since the Red Hat Halloween release (back in the twentieth century) and have run SUSE, Slackware, Red Hat, Arch, Debian and countless of their forks. Currently I'm settled on Pop!_OS 22.04 NVIDIA for my daily driver laptop with a built-in Nvidia GPU. It is rock solid and can run my three displays, each with a different resolution and refresh rate, without ever missing a beat. For everything else I use Debian and most of my clients run either RHEL or Oracle SEL on their production servers.

TL;DR: Pop!_OS daily driver and Debian for everything else.

Slackware is still my go to, but I have many diatros installed on VM's.

I use Arch Linux on my desktop and laptop. My servers run a mix of Debian and OpenSUSE.

I'm using Arch simply because of familiarity and comfort in using it. That and pacman being fast usually helps me make up my mind whenever I try something else. I really hadn't experienced any major breakage in any of the packages in the standard repos, especially if everything is configured correctly. So I don't really have anything to say against Arch's stability.

I also hear good things about Tumbleweed, so that could be an alternative and more complete out-of-box package, but that also highly depends on how comfortable you'll be with openSUSE's way of doing things.

It all boils down to how you prefer to configure and manage your system and its packages, really. Nothing much more than that. As long it does the job, it's usually fine.

I searched for years. Nothing really clicked... I've finally settled on ParrotOS. Their flagship is a pen testing distro like Kali, but they have a home distro as well, I've been using it for quite some time.

Stability is huge for me, and regular updates. Privacy focused, based on Debian.

Hope this helps your search :)

I've been using MX, formerly known as Mepis, for over 15 years now. It's the most stable release I've ever used, and their repos are pretty up to date. The community is great also.

I've been using Garuda (arch derivative) for my home and work PC. It works how I want it to, I like that it has BTRFS as default for the file system, and the AUR is such an amazing resource I miss it whenever I use a different distro.

I have a production server that's using Alma at the moment, but with the RHEL news I'm thinking of switching it over to something else, but I'm not sure what yet. I've been using Ubuntu server for some test servers/projects and I like it better than Alma but it still hasn't given me that "wow" factor I feel with Arch so I'm not sure what I'm going to do there...

Arch or manjaro because I can find so much more stuff in AUR.

Not to long ago I would of said Fedora but recently I've switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and I'm really enjoying it. Still learning the ins and outs though.

I tried quite a few of distros and I keep on going back to Fedora. A lot of things come out of the box such as Flatpak, it won't pester you about the password when you just want to install a app and i barely find myself solving issues with command line.

My other two favorites are Mint and Pop, i can recommend these to beginners and I really just like a good out of the box experience, avoiding command line where possible. Are there others that tick these boxes?

On my desktop I run Debian 12 (stable) and on my old laptop I have been playing around with Peppermint OS.

Personally, I've been running Debian everywhere (both on my servers and for desktop use) for a few years and I've found it much more reliable than Ubuntu. Sure, the repos tend to be somewhat out-of-date (unless you're on testing, which I've started using more and more and have yet to experience any actual problems with), but most of the time it makes no difference and if I really need the latest version of something I can just spin up a Docker container.

I’m running NixOS on my laptop and I really like it though I haven’t been able to get Resilio going. It’s challenging sometimes but when I have things the way I want them I have a great sense of order. So it’s the most satisfying Linux I’ve tried.

Linux Mint is my go-to. It's stable and if I want the latest update of anything, I use one of these:

• PPA
• Flatpak
• Docker

I think people underestimate how useful docker can be for running various stuff, I have few semi-permanent containers for some software and it works great.

I've been using Arch Linux as a daily driver for about two years I believe. As with any other distribution, it depends on the user's preferences, experience and needs, whether or not I'll recommend them Arch.

What I like the most about Arch is the customization from the ground up, the rich, detailed and yet user-friendly Arch Wiki, the AUR (although one shouldn't depend on it too much) and that after the installation everything seems more trouble-free than the distributions I've tried before. Arch almost never broke for me and even then fixing the issues weren't a big problem. It's not as difficult as it is often portrayed.

Nor is it as easy as it is often portrayed. A new user could be comfortable starting with Arch Linux, but it doesn't hurt to have experienced another distribution that is intended to be user-friendly.

Xubuntu for "I need this to just work" daily driving, and assorted other stuff for screwing around with. I like the idea of immutable OSes and have considered silverblue and am watching the development of vanillaos...

I am typically on Arch on all my machines since 2006. For a while I bootstrapped new machines using EndeavorOS, but usually stripped out their packages and returned to vanilla arch. Since I now prefer ZFS as root fs, I am back to installing from scratch, to get exactly the layout I want.

I use NixOS on my main PC.

If you want to use NixOS, you have to be willing to read.

Two things are especially difficult:

Coding: You will have to learn the Nix-specific way for everything you do. How does Nodejs work in NixOS? How does GCC work in NixOS? How does my IDE work in NixOS?

Using unofficial packages: The nix repos are very large and you'll most likely find everything you need there (or on flatpak/flathub). But if something isn't there, the easiest way tends to be packaging it as a nix package yourself. And that's something many people probably don't want to do.

The coding thing is annoying enough that I may switch away from NixOS at some point.

Other than that, NixOS is great.

I’ve hopped around to a bunch of different distros, but I always return to Debian Stable. I don’t really need the most bleeding-edge packages for my system, due to my use case.

Most of my actual apps are installed via Flatpak, so they’re all pretty recent, while still being on a rock-solid stable distribution.

Well I would have normally said Fedora but with the current RedHat issues I'm thinking of making a switch. but in my opinion Fedora was always rock stable and leading edge. currently looking at an alternative.

Fedora for me as it seems to work the best for my hardware, will be moving to Kinoite when I get the chance. i already am using distrobox and Flatpak in general. Tried NixOS (with Root on ZFS) but couldn't get hp-wmi module to work on on it. I was having some problems with Opensuse Nvidia drivers (wakeup from suspend didn't work sometimes). The one thing I miss on Fedora, that Opensuse has is Full-Disk Encryption.

Xubuntu - great ootb configuration, lightning fast on my old thinkpad without compromising on functionality

Void Linux is the way to go, I've been using it for a few years now with no issues. Currently gaming with arch but I was gaming on void for a while, before I decided to hop. Might go back but switching over is such a hassle at the moment.

I keep coming back to Fedora and I used to hate GNOME but I've learn to appreciate it "just working out of the box". I used to be config tweaker master but now appreciate things just working for the most part without me touching it.

unless we're talking about my main machine, which runs gentoo, i'll always default to alpine. super solid base system and packages. super accessible when it comes to upstreaming packages. I only wish they had s6 as an option for init/service manager

For stability, I would definitely suggest a immutable distro

VanillaOS is pretty neat. It has an immutable (kind of) OS, lets you choose which package formats you want to use (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) and leverages containers (a la Distrobox) and their package manager Apx to give you seamless access to packages on other distros. It's Ubuntu-based right now but the next release is switching to debian.

To be fair, I don't have much time on it. My daily drivers are a chromebook and a steamdeck, but I did dust off an old laptop just to check it out for a little bit.

Fedora. Mainly because I work at a RHEL shop and I want a daily driver that is somewhat similar to my work environment.

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.

Fedora is my daily driver.

I install Ubuntu LTS for family/friends, as the more stable software makes supporting them easier, and they should have a few years of no major problems if I get hit by a truck.

Right now I use pop_os. I bought a System76 laptop so it came with it. I like it because most things just work and I am lazy. Not the biggest gnome fan though. Previous to owning this laptop I tinkered with many distros but usually leaned towards lightweight DEs like xfce.

btw arch Linux

U want stability stick to debian, bleeding egde apps? NixOs.

Middle ground? Ubuntu Rolling, u get reasonable up to day updates, and reasonable stability.

And remember, the perfect distro is the one u configure, and personalize for u. The distro is only gonna make ur life easier in making it urs, but that's all, I wasted a lot of time understanding this.

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

I use Pop_OS because I really like having so much much GUI control via the keyboard. I'm patiently waiting for Cosmic to update things a bit.

I use Gentoo for my daily driver, and Debian for servers.

In general, Ubuntu is my go-to when I just want something that works and is reasonably stable. Just pick the spin with the Desktop Environment that you like. I'm using KDE Neon (I realize Neon isn't an Ubuntu flavor or spin) on my daily driver laptop, and Ubuntu MATE on my desktop. I also have an old netbook that usually gets Xubuntu, but currently has Fedora 37 XFCE as an experiment.

It sure is nice that we have to option to distro-hop, either on bare metal or in a VM.

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

So I use Arch for my personal work. I never had a problem with stability. I've also started to be interested in NixOS, but I'm gonna just use it as an Server OS, I feel like it makes sense with the infrastructure as code implications.

An immutable OS with flatpak, snap or appimage :

Fedora silverblue, nixos, vanilla os, guix, steam deck...

While there is still lot limitation using only flatpak, snap or appimage, i believe that in the next decade they will slowly grow and end up that packaging nightmare.

So we can have an OS up to date, latest app without worrying any breakage. But i'm not well versed and dunno if people and dev will follow that road.

I think it's time to ditch apt, dnf, rpm, aur. I imagine it would ease dev work but i'm not sure.

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.

I semi-regularly distro-hop, but Xubuntu is the distro I keep coming back to between hops to take a break or when one goes (temporarily) dormant. It's currently running on my primary server/linux machine.

Reasons: 1.) It's light on resources 2.) It's very simple and clean. 3.) It works with all the programs I use regularly; only one needs to be hand-compiled (but that one has to be compiled for literally any Linux machine). 4.) I know it. Scrub/partition/install/configure in under an hour. I can pick up any of my projects again immediately where I left off.

Go to? Probably Mint. Such a good distro. Unfortunately I recently joined camp KDE Plasma and no other desktop environment can even compare.
I'm on Fedora KDE now. Solid distro for now at least.
If I need to return to monkee: EndeavourOS

Alpine Linux, repositories contain most software for a desktop and server, minimal base system, fast package manager. I would only recommend it to an advanced user that does not use proprietary software as most of it will not run because it is linked against glibc but alpine linux uses musl libc.

Lubuntu my beloved. Ubuntu enough for me to google myself out of anything but lightweight enough to make me feel good about what I'm spending cycles/battery on... and familiar enough that I don't need to learn a whole new desktop paradigm when all I'm gonna do with the desktop gui is start an app anyway.

draft - am I allowed to type "chromeos"

Fedora XFCE, The only 2 times I ever have to touch the command line are for flatpak and for updateing, so I am not sure if I would recomend the XFCE spin, but I would recomend Fedora, probably the KDE, only because I for what ever reason cannot stand Gnome, I do not know why, but I just cannot get my workflow to work with gnome

Ubuntu because it's Linux Easy-Mode

I would only recommend it to Windows users looking to start using Linux. The average Linux user is a lot more tech-literate than me and can use the more difficult but more customizable and streamlined distros, and the average Windows user has no chance on Linux, not even Ubuntu which was already a lot of work for me to switch to

Debian and Mint are my favorites. I love the included games in Debian, the UI for both (Using cinnamon), and their ease of use.

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.

Debian. Stable, its developers care about free software above other values, most important things are decided by voting.

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.

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.

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

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

After my terrible experience with EndeavourOS and its atrocious community I'm distro hopping again. Currently having a bad time with Gnome Nobara, might try the KDE version but I do prefer something that doesn't require a reinstallation or complicated upgrade methods. Would be great it rolling distros wouldn't just self destruct though. Maybe I give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a chance. I heard it is supposedly more stable.