I’m old and not keen on tinkering around anymore, that’s why I use Linux Mint Cinnamon. It just works and doesn’t take much time to maintain.

I use arch with kde with very little modification apart from changing wallpapers and taskbar stuff to make it more windows like. I’m a boring guy who still can’t get away from the Windows feel

I started with Puppy Linux because I wanted to try Linux, and my 350MHz Celeron with 160MB of RAM and 4GB of disk space (of which I had around 1GB free) wasn’t enough to run neither any flavor of the major distros, nor any remotely recent version of Windows that wasn’t XP stripped down to the bare minimum, and even that ran like shit. This was around 2008.

After being able to afford a more recent machine (3GHz Intel something Dual Core, with 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDD), I switched to vanilla Ubuntu, with its Unity DE, then Xfce4.

I’ve been using the LUbuntu flavor (LXDE) since it is more lightweight than the alternatives. Don’t really care about bells and whistles now, just a functional and fast desktop.

My most recent laptop is dead now, tho, and I don’t see myself getting anything soon :(

I also use openSUSE Tumbleweed for the same reasons as you. In my case I also like the security configuration that openSUSE has (SELinux+Firewalld) and its snapshot restore tool in case of failure (snapper). I think openSUSE is one of the distributions that enforces security the most as soon as you install the system and to maintain that security I try to install only the software I need and I try not to add external repositories. I would like to try Aeon because I think it is a more security-focused distro but I still need to dual-boot with Windows to connect to my work and Aeon doesn’t allow this. In short, I use Tumbleweed as it comes out of the box and just add the packman repository. Many people think that Linux is free of malware and viruses and install many programs from aur, obs, external repositories,… without thinking that they are giving root access to code of dubious origin.

Because it lets me decide how my computers are supposed to work, instead of some cocaine-fueled asshole manager in Redmond or Cupertino.

Mint Cinnamon. I’m very new to Linux, only switched about a month ago after using Windows for almost 35 years (my first computer was a windows 95).

Really enjoying it so far, and it’s actually a fun learning experience.

I’m a fairly new user to Linux and I first got a laptop with Pop OS since I read that it was a beginner friendly distro and great for gaming. Although I didn’t use it for gaming it was great to get to learn how to use Linux and use it for everyday purposes.

Later with lots of trial and error got Fedora Linux working on an old laptop with bad battery life that was lying around. I wanted to try my hand at a bit more of an advanced distro. So far I’m loving both distributions and learning more each day about how things work.

I primarily want something simple I can bend to my will, and secondly I want a good out of the box experience. For me that’s been Arch + KDE. The wiki and AUR are great!

I would say every step of the way I just wanted more and more ownership of my system. I make it, I break it. One specific experience which drove me to that camp was the time I had to jailbreak my iPhone and dig through files to disable some deprecated parental control setting… give me ownership over my stuff!

I use whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is on my desktops and usually laptops (besides my Macbook) at the time, and whatever the latest stable Debian release is at the time on my home lab servers.

I am very much a utilitarian and function over form kind of person so I choose what I do because it is the best fit for the problem I was trying to solve, usually with little thought to looks or UI design. I find I don’t really care so much how something is done on a given platform, just that there is a way. As a result stuff like theme options, dynamic wallpapers, etc are not something I really care about. I have been using the same black image as my wallpaper on every computer I have used for at least a decade now for example. I arrange the UI in whatever way I feel is the most functional for me within the constraints of what the platform supports out of the box. Meaning I couldn’t care less for stuff like the old school Window blinds program and what not.

Ubuntu over Windows because I wanted to get away from the ever increasing ads and general slop that Microsoft was putting into Windows while still retaining some support for gaming(thanks to Valve and Proton) and building my own systems.

Debian on servers over Ubuntu or something RPM based because Debian stable is rock solid and will run whatever you put on it without issue in my experience.

I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I’d found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in “Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?” ways, which I didn’t want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I’m experimenting with local LLM on it.

I use Arch with KDE Plasma. It just works.

Debian with xfce. Because I’m old. I don’t want to change, damnit!

Debian because it’s like Ubuntu (one of the most popular distros, with tons of software targeting it) minus the Canonical stuff I don’t need. And newer Debians even have Wi-Fi out of the box

xfce or KDE because GNOME is just too far-out for me. They wanted to get rid of tray icons and stuff. They keep moving things around, seemingly for the sake of moving things around, or maybe to look more like phones. I don’t need my desktop to be a phone.

apt isn’t the greatest package manager but, there’s a lot to be said for popularity, and no matter how many times someone said “Don’t upgrade Arch the wrong way” I kept breaking my Arch install. Debian works because apt doesn’t let me accidentally break it. (I think I was doing the pacman equivalent of apt update and then apt install. I don’t know why the fuck that breaks a PM. The point of a PM is to keep yourself from breaking stuff. If I wanted broken shit I wouldn’t use the PM. On two occasions Arch also soft-bricked itself because I updated pacman into a state where it could no longer run. This seems like one of the simplest things a good PM should prevent. Whereas with apt, I’m not sure it’s been updated ever. It ain’t perfect but it’s predictable.)

I use Linux because it is free and good enough to do most stuff I want to do on a computer.

I use windows at work because I get paid - so from my perspective it is cheaper than free. It makes it frustrating to do the stuff I’m supposed to do but my employers are fucking idiots so it doesn’t really matter.

You’re being very melodramatic about the whole thing…

It’s a computer. We want to use it under our terms. End of story.