Currently I’m on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, a recent convert. I wanted up-to-date packages except with a stronger expectation of reliability than Debian testing, and my brain isn’t big enough to install Arch. It’s going quite nicely, stable despite the hundreds of updates every week. Wayland doesn’t seem to perform as well as it did on Debian but I don’t really need it yet.
KDE because I like their philosophy, Qt apps feel really comfortable, and it’s customisable enough to recreate my quasi-Windows XP desktop experience.
I’ve been using Debian testing with KDE for over a decade and have so far never found a reason to switch to anything else.
In terms of stability I’ve probably only hit a show stopper once a year at most, and it is usually caused by a newer incompatible kde library being accidentally promoted from unstable to testing before the other related packages (usually easy to fix once once you realise what is going on). Another minor issue is that the testing repository gets frozen before stable releases, but the freeze windows have significantly reduced with the last couple of releases and I probably care less about needing the latest packages than I used to (probably in part due to how functional the Linux ecosystem is these days).
One of the significant benefits of Debian is that it is a community distro, so you end up with a lot less weird decision making that pisses of the users (ie. Canonical/Ubuntu and snaps, RedHat and CentOS streams, etc.)
The “Joy” theme from Debian 7/wheezy (2012‽) is still my favourite Debian theme…
Debian Testing / i3 and custom DE as such (mostly just essential gnome based tools I need) but mostly drive things from my urxvt terminals. I build it up from a Debian netinst to keep it small, then I have the base setup defined in a ansible-playbook (which I should probably update) and then tweak.
I’ve been running with Debian Testing for many years now - not sure I’m up to a decade though, but probably not too far off. Only had two or so bumps - and that was more so kernels and peripherals (wifi and nvidia drivers jump to mind). I love that it just keeps rolling - nice and easy. (I actually currently have my kernel still pinned, need to undo that.)
I love the minimalism of i3, and the speed of navigation.
Just good 'ol Arch/KDE. Can’t be bothered to use a WM, KDE works great for me (great customizability, fast, etc) and arch mainly because of speed (in terms of startup/idling, but mostly the package manager)
I’ve been a chronic distro hopper in the past and have finally settled on Ubuntu for the time being. Don’t mind their somewhat controversial design decisions… Still better than Windows in some important areas. And it just clicks for me, so used to it. But I alternate on and off Windows and Linux (and Mac) generally.
Qubes for me. It hits all the right buttons (though it does chug a little more what with the VMM overhead and whatnot but that’s a fair trade). Still use Windows for work and gaming but Qubes is
What’s your favourite and why? Share a screenshot if it takes your fancy!
