Debian Woody > Red Hat 7.0 > Slackware 9.0 > Slackware 10 > Debian > Ubuntu > Mac OS > Ubuntu > Arch.

At least for desktops and laptops.

For servers I'm still primarily running Debian (and one instance I'm running Arch).

The reason why I settled on Arch is primarily because the combination of bleeding edge and being stable enough for daily driving it. The AUR also adds sooo much, that there is nothing I really don't need to manually install anymore.

For servers, I basically want a rock stable system. Hence why I've chosen Debian Stable.

Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, Suse, Gentoo, Sourcemage, etc...

I've settled for Manjaro 6 years ago and never saw a reason to change. I'm also super happy with Debian on my server.

Started with Gentoo. Early 2000's. 24 painful install. Moved to fedora shortly after. Keep going back between Arch and Ubuntu over the years. It's all so easy and accessible now.

I went from Windows XP -> FreeBSD -> Debian -> several Ubuntu flavors -> MacOS -> Manjaro on my desktop. I ended up switching to MacOs after countless upgrade and graphics card issues in the early 2010s but switched back to Linux again after getting tired of Apples more and more restrictive environment.

For servers I've switched around between FreeBSD, Debian and Ubuntu at home and various Redhat based distros at work.

Right now I use Ubuntu because it just works for my Kubernetes home cluster and Redhat at work because its well supported for commercial software.

I went Ubuntu -> Xubuntu -> Debian -> Manjaro -> Arch -> Nix

Arch is still the longest lasting and I'm dual booting with Nix right now, but Nix has been a dream when it comes to gaming stability and I think if it continues I'll stay.

Started with Mint with Cinnamon on the desktop since that's the "beginner" distro. Then FOMO about Arch (btw) made me switch to Manjaro with KDE.

Then I got an older used server with 64 GB of RAM. I started the server journey with Ubuntu Server, which was fine. But since I was running everything in containers anyway and wanted to experiment, I switched to Proxmox and I love it. It is flexible and fun. All of my production LXCs run Ubuntu LTS for ease and consistency in updating, but I have a couple of other VMs for experimenting with other distros and dealing with FOMO. I also installed Proxmox on an old gaming PC I had lying around, so now I have a homelab cluster. Why? Haha, why not! Proxmox is a distro-hopper and tinkerer's playground.

Windows -> Mint -> PopOS -> EndeavorOS

I tried Mint for a few days, enjoyed it but wanted something a bit more gaming focused. Tried Pop, had issues getting it set up, got it set up and didn't like it. Moved to Endeavor, and after a brief learning period, its been everything I wanted in an OS.

I fucking love EndeavorOS

Ubuntu > Sabayon > mint > Arch > Mandriva > CentOS > Debian testing & Arch ( just the best ones )

I used Void Linux for a while, but now I am staying on NixOS. It's got great features that I'll probably miss on other distros.

Beginning: Ubuntu.
Until today: Arch

Why? I found in Arch updated software that I was interested at that time, I liked the rolling distro, minimalism, AUR.

I'm happy with my TWM (DWM) and multiplexer (tmux).

I did install other distros in old hardware like Slitaz, Debían that needs 32 bit.

I'm interested right now in things like Alpine and Void, because small and functional in Termux or older hardware. And some distrobox (similar to proot-distro in Termux).

Now learning a little bit of Groff with markdown (pandoc) to create PDF, for a small and fast typesetting. I haven't found a way to convert markdown to pdf using MOM macros in Groff.

Xubuntu... It's light weight and pretty much everything is kind of Debian or kind of redhat anyway...

The charm of rolling my own died off when I got old enough to buy better hardware if I wanted to go faster...

Which one(s)

Unsure if distrohopping the dualboot counts, but if it does, then the following was my path (note that after Fedora Silverblue was installed, it remained on the system; the two distros in between the two Silverblues were dualboots):

Fedora Kinoite -> Fedora Silverblue -> EndeavourOS -> Nobara -> Fedora Silverblue

why?

I started with Fedora Kinoite after spending 1-2 weeks on gathering information on distros. During the research-phase, I learned what distros are, their components, how to analyze the differences between distros, which components are ultimately more beneficial for me and thus slowly but surely the distro that would suit me best started to take shape.

My switch to Linux was on the basis of privacy concerns and Windows 10's mishaps on my laptop were what pulled the trigger, which in retrospect were probably caused by hardware faults. Regardless, as privacy was my main concern, security became paramount; as there's no privacy as long as access to your data is not secured off. Therefore Qubes OS, while not necessarily a Linux distro, would have been my first choice. But, unfortunately, my system wasn't capable of running it.

Therefore, I had to settle with something else. As my endgame is Qubes OS, I wasn't very interested in getting into the nitty gritty of Linux for the virtue of hardening it. Instead, I opted to rely on a distro that would do the heavy lifting for me. Such a distro wouldn't only have to be known for taking security very seriously, they also required an excellent track record. As such, I landed on Fedora, Kicksecure and openSUSE. Other projects that are known to take security seriously like Whonix and Tails aren't suited for general use. Furthermore, they're ideally used in conjunction with another system; Whonix as a VM and Tails accessed on a USB-stick whenever you require an amnesic operating system.

Choosing between Fedora, Kicksecure and openSUSE was hard based on these criteria only. The third and final criteria to seal the deal was atomicity. Like I mentioned earlier, my laptop had issues; it could randomly turn off. So I needed a robust system that could handle such disturbances and not die in the process. This is where the aforementioned atomicity comes into play, this ensures that the system either updates or not; no in-between messed up state due to a power outage or whatsoever. At the time, only Fedora had a somewhat mature system capable of atomic upgrades; namely Kinoite and Silverblue. The differences between these two were about their respective desktop environments. I hadn't experienced either of the two previously, but went initially for Kinoite for how KDE Plasma reminded me more of what I was already used to (i.e. Windows).

Fedora Kinoite came with its sets of troubles. It was still a relatively young project; it was the first release in which it was officially supported. As I knew how easy Fedora's Atomic distros made switching from one base to another, I just rebased to Fedora Silverblue with the rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/35/x86_64/silverblue command and went on with my life 😜.

After this came the honeymoon-phase and I was really positively surprised by how well everything was going. From all the things I had done for the sake of privacy, switching to Linux was (and still is) my favorite. But as I was ever expanding my Linux workflow to include everything I did on Windows, I happened to reach a (seemingly) insurmountable obstacle; Davinci Resolve. No matter what I did on Fedora Silverblue, it was always functioning less performant compared to Windows; which in retrospect seems to be related to the fact that Davinci Resolve requires a dedicated GPU on Linux (though some workarounds do exist). In hopes of resolving this issue, I tried to install Arch as a dualboot. As this was pre archinstall, this was a miserable experience. And after a few tries, I still wasn't content with what I got and instead opted to install EndeavourOS.

EndeavourOS was pretty cool. I already liked what I saw from Arch within Distrobox and EndeavourOS was able to deliver an excellent experience (at least initially). Davinci Resolve worked better here than it did in Fedora Silverblue. And it was overall a pretty snappy experience, so I returned to it occasionally for other things (like gaming) as well. Until..., one day..., it just stopped working 🤣. Perhaps I could have done a better job by installing Snapper/Timeshift, but I didn't and didn't care enough for it to reinstall...

Of course, the departure of EndeavourOS did leave behind a void, so eventually I tried Nobara as I believed it might be capable to provide a similar experience. And I did like it, though not to the degree of EndeavourOS. Eventually this one also passed out 🤣.

Currently, I've just dismissed the idea to run Davinci Resolve on Linux and I'm more happy ever since 😜. For better performance during gaming, I've since been resorting to bazzite-arch and Conty. While performance shouldn't be as good as native CachyOS or other highly optimized gaming distributions, it's more than fine as is and the sub 5% performance/fps I'm missing out on is not worth for how much more convenient my current setup is.

FWIW, I do see myself utilizing Gentoo and NixOS in their designated qubes whenever the switch to Qubes OS occurs. But until then, I'm making the best out of Fedora Silverblue.

Gentoo for personal experimentation

Mint for work & recommending to beginners

Debian for personal production, work, & pretty much everything else

Ubuntu -> Manjaro -> Arch -> Gentoo -> NixOS

Startend with ubuntu, didnt like "appy", mobile feel of gnome, switched to manjaro KDE, loved it but kept breaking and I wasn't smart enough to fix

Settled on good Ol Debian KDE, miss the AUR but things are stable and working

Still got a win pc to play league, work with office and make music though.

arch with gnome. arch because pacman and AUR, gnome because I messed around with tiling window managers for an unnecessarily long time but I don't have infinite time to customize and personalize every aspect of my computer and map every action to a keyboard shortcut and memorize them :) I need to det stuff done. I sort of forced myself into using the least amount of customization. that's why not KDE.

Crux. Simplest package building system out there, and the core is just out of the way completely, giving you the keys to setup your system just the way you want it.

Windows, then Ubuntu when I started Computer Science, then Linux Mint, and I've been hopping back and forth between both but mostly Mint, then for a while also KDE Neon, then I decided to leave my comfort zone and tried Fedora, and never looked back.

It's been over like 10 years but it has gone something like this Windows -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Mint -> Windows -> Ubuntu -> Solus -> Fedora -> Arch -> Manjaro -> Windows -> POP_OS -> Arch -> Manjaro

Nowhere. I install whatever will actually get through the installation process without fucking itself up on the hardware that I'm using.

MOST of the time that ends up being Mint because the developers aren't idiots. SOMETIMES it's Ubuntu. But neither wants to install properly every time, because of course not.

Arch Linux (Endeavour OS if you are scared of the terminal) for personal use. It's almost all the software you want one click away, plus the best documentation ever.

Debian on my company's computer because Debian.

Keep distrohopping. I think I cannot settle.