Asklemmy

Windows 11 and Arch. Primarily the former. It just works, and I need it for work and playing co-op games with friends.

Windows 11 on my work/gaming system, Ubuntu Server on the server that runs PiHole, VPN, and file sharing, MX Linux on my laptop. On my W11 machine I've also got VMware with machines running every version of Windows from 95 through 7, a few different Linux variants for testing, Mac OS, and a few Win10 lab machines for work. Don't get me started on how much I've upgraded this machine since I bought it in 2021!

Windows 11 on my main desktop, Debian + KDE on my garage desktop, and Debian on my home server and cloud server.

My main rig and my 3D printing rig are on windows 10, they would be 11 but I'd have to enable to the TPM on both to make it happen and I'm lazy.

My server is on Linux because server. It's currently running TrueNAS Scale and I'm thinking I might spin up some other things considering it's got 24 cores and 200 GB of ram it really should be doing more than just being a NAS.

I have a lot of PCs for different purposes, so this answer could probably be considered cheating. It really depends on what I am doing. I'll go in order of Highest usage to Least usage, and separate professional usage and personal usage.

Personal

• Future gaming PC: PopOS
  • Maybe breaking my own ordering rules a little bit, but this will see the most use when I'm done.
  • I am currently in the process of building this.
  • I am finally going to try to not use windows for gaming, it's possible it could be futile, but Valve's work on Wine/Proton has made amazing strides.
• Previous gaming PC: Dual boot Ubuntu 22.04/Windows 10
  • This is likely to become almost primarily an Ubuntu machine soon.
  • Not compatible with windows 11, the windows part is around only to preserve files at this point
    • Once I copy everything I want and need, I will see if I can move my filesystems around, this will probably be a huge pain.
• "Gaming" Laptop: Windows 10
  • This is merely my most powerful laptop, it would never outperform my future gaming PC, but it's certainly a lot more convenient.
  • I'm considering switching over to some flavor of linux at some point, but I'm not ready to do that yet. (Plus I have to see what works with this laptop)
  • It is compatible with Windows 11, but I'm not sure if I want to do that. (I may do it just to get the free license, if I need to)
• Media laptop: Windows 10
  • Originally a "gaming" laptop, it can't keep up nowadays.
  • I converted it into a streaming platform for my console games
  • Not compatible with windows 11, so when it goes out of support I will need to find an alternative.
    • This will be tricky, the last time I tried to install Ubuntu on it, I got kernel panics during the install process. I'm sure there's something I'm missing to make it work, but I don't have the time/patience/urgency right now.
• College Laptop: Ubuntu 22.04
  • I used this primarily for college when I was continuing my education.
    • It made connecting to the University's Linux servers a lot easier.
  • Has a development environment set up on it.
  • The least powerful "general purpose" computer I have
  • I'm not sure what to do with this computer now.
• "Pi Hole" Raspberry Pi: Raspbian
  • Used as my personal DNS server.
  • Kind of single purpose at the moment.
  • I'm not sure if I should use it for anything else?

Professional

I'm not going to list every computer here, so I'll just categorize them by purpose.

• Development: Windows 10
  • I'm a .NET Developer
  • Visual Studio Enterprise requires Windows 10+
• Server: Windows Server
  • For deploying web applications
• CI/CD : Various Linux OSes
  • Used for version control servers and CI/CD Pipelines

I personally find Operating Systems to be situational. I wouldn't say one is really better than the other. However, I've been moving away from Windows for personal use lately, as I've been getting more and more frustrated with the overall user experience. I know that custom shells for Windows exist, but I don't know how good of an idea it is to use them.

I'm a programmer and what you'd probably call a computer nerd. I used Windows XP, Vista and 7 until 2016, when I then decided to give Linux (Mint+Cinnamon) a try. Loved it so much, my dual boot days were short and I quickly started using the penguin OS as my sole daily driver. After some very traditional distro hopping, I landed on Manjaro KDE, and have been a happy user for some years.
From an end-user PoV, Manjaro is great because of the frequent rolling-release package updates, nice community support and kernel and driver tools (the mhwd ones), while KDE Plasma is by far my favourite desktop environment, being simple by default but very powerful when needed. GNOME has a more Apple-y look to it, which I know is quite attractive as well, but since I'm more of a power user, KDE stuff is a no-brainer. Other DEs and tilling WMs are also nice, but I'm so happy with KDE I'm not going to switch anytime soon.

Zorin OS right now

I have one desktop running windows 11 home and one laptop running Ubuntu 22.04. I use windows 11 for gaming and some windows stuff, and Ubuntu as my daily drive. The reason I use ubuntu is simple, It's a tradeoff between new software and stability especially with my stupid nvidia graphic card. I tried Manjaro too, but sometimes after I updated the gnome DE, gnome-shell just somehow stutter and leak.

manjaro and win11 for some obscure things I need it for.

Ubuntu Mate on two main PCs. One running windows ten for TurboTax 😭

Using openSUSE Tumbleweed on my main PC. Works very well for my use; probably my favorite rolling release distro.

I use windows 11 on the main PC. Ease of use for everyone in the household plus easy access to mainstream gaming. I use Linux Mint on my personal laptop. I'm not much of a power user these days so Mint has everything I need for my slightly older laptop.

Windows 11. It works better on my new machine even though I had to do extra steps to suppress the tracker and such.

Win 11 on my desktop and laptop. Unraid on my home server.

Kubuntu 23.04 With the panel to the left.

Depends. My laptop has Windows 10 as a backup, but runs current Linux mint w/cinnamon DE

My desk pc is on Windows 7, with a secondary drive I can boot from that's tuning running mint as well.

The household pc is running debian w/plasma because my wife likes it better than cinnamon. I tried mint on it, and gor whatever reason, it didn't "like" mint but debian works fine.

There's also the old PC I used to use as my writing computer. It's running debian with xfce because it doesn't get used by anyone else, and it's slow as hell with plasma or cinnamon. I don't really use it much, but nobody wanted the damn thing, so I keep it set up for the occasions when I need to be able to lock a door so I'm not interrupted. Which is when I have writer's block, not the other thing lol.

I just use Ubuntu 22.04 on my personal home-built PC. It just works, and I'm not interested in too much tinkering. My wife's PC also runs Ubuntu 22.04, I have a ton of raspberry Pi's with standard raspbian on them. And my work laptop runs Windows 11 and it is decent enough.

I'm happy. I can run Steam with all the games I want pretty flawlessly, with some minor tinkering sometimes. But it is a solid experience.

NixOS. Mainly use it for the reproducible configuration between my machines. I've got my dotfiles hosted at https://github.com/chadac/dotfiles

Debian Stable 11, shitjustworks

I'm a big fan of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and use it on all of my machines (including my WSL2 provider for my Win10 machine at work).

It is great, incredibly stable with pre-configured btrfs snapshots and rollback with snapper out of the box. Now that Proton is so good for gaming, I can't even remember the last time I booted up my windows partition. Also rolling release if you are into that sort of thing.

EndeavourOS. It's a variant of Arch, I had hopped around different OS and was on Windows for a bit before switching back to Linux. Ive stuck with Endeavour as it feels quick and nimble but performs great on gaming (better than the native windows install on my PC) and the access to the AUR is a massive perk

GNU/Linux (openSUSE Tumbleweed, KDE Neon, Gentoo, Arch/SteamOS on Steam Deck) all with KDE Plasma desktop. Because the KDE Plasma desktop is way ahead of anything I've ever used on proprietary OSes. Also in general GNU/Linux is leading both technically and ethically, as it is also being free (as in freedom) and opensource software, respects our privacy, and doesn't bother you with ads.

Had Ubuntu for a decade then got bored and turned my hp Spectre laptop into a Hackintosh and got hooked. So it's macOS now.

I really wish I could say SqueakNOS an experimental OS written in Smalltalk by some crazy beautiful people, but alas that dream died over a decade ago. Imagine the excitement of being able to rewrite any part of your OS on the fly and the terror when it all went wrong.

macOS because I own a MacBook.

If not, Arch Linux. Used it for years prior to buying my MacBook.

Endeavour OS KDE. It just works and you have access to the AUR repository, which is huge.

Windows 10 for my main desktop, Windows 11 on my laptop, and work desktop.

I love Linux, it's a great OS but it has a lot of usability issues alongside corporations that won't support it. GamePass and Visual Studio are the two major things I use on Windows that don't have any ability to run on Linux.

Because I know people are going to ask, the usability issues on Linux have been:

Fedora Linux: Mouse settings didn't work (sensitivity and acceleration), updating the OS bricked the boot because I had the Nvidia proprietary drivers installed and the update didn't account for that.

Manjaro: Worked great but still had the same mouse issues where I couldn't update sensitivity and setting the profile to "flat" to remove mouse acceleration didn't actually remove mouse acceleration.

In General: I've found Linux to contain a level of jank that Windows just doesn't have. It still needs a good bit of polish. Linus Tech Tips did a Linux Desktop trial for a week and documented a lot of unpolished bits.

I look forward to the day that Linux has become more polished.

Home computer - Windows 10, because I didn't like Windows 11 School laptop - Windows 11, because I sacrificed it to see if I would like W11 on my home computer Work computer - Mac OS, because I don't get a say in it