Because Minecraft ran dramatically faster on Gentoo than Arch.

... That's it. That's the reason.

I also switched to Linux in the first place because Minecraft ran dramatically faster on Ubuntu than Windows.

i picked pop OS for my laptop because it has nvidia drivers built in, but ive been seriously considering switching to like, standard ubuntu, because the pop shop (the package manager for this distro) is just broken af on my install and i havent been using it often enough to fix it

on my desktop and laptop, I use Xubuntu because...

• I like Xfce
• It was my first Linux distro

On servers, I use Debian Stable because it's er. stable. rock solid, never fails. in the near-ish future, I will probably start using Debian Testing on my main machines because Canonical Fuckin Sux.

Linux mint was the first i tried and it immediately fixed my little thinkpads trackpad issue so i kept with it.

Three:

• Gentoo is on the solid state drive of my desktop, following Duxsco's guide on how to set it up on a LUKS partition. (I had previous used Sakaki's, but due to her work contract forbidding her to do FOSS work for some reason, it's gone outdated.) I unfortunately don't use it much because there's always something not quite right about my setup. Probably a me problem. I like the concept of it, though, and have been at the very least poking at it for years after a friend told me about it.
• Solus is on my storage drive. I kind of discovered it in a list of distros usable for gaming. It's a little more of a curated experience, so I was curious about it. It's not especially useful on the slow 5400 RPM storage drive, though, so I'd probably need to put it on the SSD if I really wanted to use it.
• Mint is on my underpowered laptop, because it is an underpowered laptop and Mint tends to do well on those. Cinnamon may not have been the best option, though. I might consider switching to Solus Xfce when that becomes an option (it is not currently).

It also amuses me that the local university has a general purpose Linux package mirror that spans like fifteen distros. Sadly, the download speeds are kind of low.

VPS ran Ubuntu already. Wanted dev environment to be identical to production.

Previous vague "I want to be a programmer. I should use Linux" in my late teens early 20s was Ubuntu because it had the reputation as "the easy one".

But like? No complaints really after all these years that I feel like another distro would have necessarily avoided. I guess retroactively for awhile Ubuntu did the the X to close on the left corner instead of right (or maybe it was right side but the leftmost button, I forget) and I somehow got used to that, but now it seems absurd and like something they did just to say "Look, we're not like Windows!"

Switching to Plasma however was probably the best thing I ever did.

Historically I've used arch because I was in the sickos.tar.gz pile and really liked diving into everything running and why. As I've gotten older and wanted things to work with less intervention on my part I've basically switched every machine over to either mint or more recently pop, and that's been nice.

i picked gentoo 20ish years ago because my usb adsl modem needed all kinds of patched stuff, so it was the only real choice if i wanted internet on linux. i distrohopped a bunch after those patches were elsewhere but kept bouncing back because gentoo was the only good rolling release in 200x and i grew accustomed to that. there just wasn't much choice and the other options usually didn't care for the ati/nvidia proprietary graphics drivers. i needed those because i was a linux gamer, by which i mean i played unreal tournament 2004 and world of warcraft in wine

i'm on nixos now as of about a month ago, mostly because all of my reasons for using gentoo were stuck in 200x and i finally wanted to try something new + exciting

i use nixos so i can fuck with stuff without really bloating my system at all and recover/reset easily without losing much, all feels very lean especially compared to arch that did feel like it would bloat over time if i was tinkering alot just due to installing lots of packages

I have been a fervent Debian advocate for almost two decades but I finally think I've landed on Arch in recent months because the wiki is genuinely unrivaled.

I use void linux. I’ve previously dabbled in a lot of different distros because it took me a while to figure out what I actually wanted. Arch is probably my runner up, but void has a lot of the things I liked about arch (rolling release, minimal by default) and not as much of the things I didn’t (so bleeding edge it would actually break, systemd). But yeah, maybe obvious to everyone but me but a distro is primarily defined by its package manager and base software. This is why I had a terrible time with slackware, will never try gentoo, and avoid the distros that ship systemd + GNOME3 by default (I’m a hater of both sorry not sorry). <3 void linux and its X-Box Packaging System.

I'm running Artix w/ runit on my main machine, and have been since I got this laptop just over 3 years ago. I love being able to use the AUR alongside a dead simple init system. Previously, I ran Arch for 4ish years, and Ubuntu for about 6 months before that.

I have a couple other boxes to experiment with- my media laptop runs Void, which is also very cool. I'm also toying around with Gentoo on musl libc, which is a bit tricky but really fun. Once I feel really confident with musl-Gentoo, I'll probably migrate my main machine over too.

Everyone gets a because I appreciate your input even though sometimes I have nothing to add

honestly can't remember why i chose void. i think i just heard about it from someone i know and was tired of dealing with pacman keyring b.s. and well, now i think every computer i touch (phone excepted) is voided and i spend most of my free time working on void stuff

Ubuntu was the big hype distro in 2006 when I first used linux and the rest of the story... yeah it's hard to see it as anything other than "i'm lazy i guess". I keep meaning to give other distros a real try but ubuntu has always been just about good enough to not make me desperate enough to go to the bother

I use manjaro w/xfce. As for why, I've been using it for so long that I've genuinely forgotten the reason why I landed on it over other ones in the first place, I just keep using it because it works for me and I don't feel much of a push to go out of my way to look at different options.

I use Pop!_OS because my computer has a lotta weird issues with Linux and Pop is the distro that's the most compatible out of the box. I don't like GNOME with a mouse (with a touchscreen, I don't mind it), but system76 has done so much to make it usable with a mouse.

I haven't used anything outside of Ubuntu when I play with Linux, but I have to download xfce when I do so. Gnome is just miserable to do anything in for me.
That's not so much a case of me trying a bunch of stuff, just that it's the first thing I've tried that wasn't a mint install with tiny UX that didn't want to run outside of single digit framerates for some reason.

I use Pop!_OS because LTT mentioned it being good for games and for n00bs, along with Manjaro and Garuda.
And I broke my Manjaro system after accidentally deleting /bin and then being unable to get a stable system that would work with my nvidia card lol.

At the moment, I've got a(n unbootable...idk what I did) Xubuntu install that I use mostly for hobby CFD stuff. I chose it mostly by Ubuntu inertia/familiarity, but I like the lightweight and simple xfce interface.

As a result of seeing @noviri successfully gaming on Garuda, and some of the comments in this thread (I kinda missed the systemd thing, but that seems...not great), I'm now wondering if/how much of both CFD and my daily stuff can be done on other distros.

Linux Mint because am n00b

(have considered attempting to install Arch on the rarely-used laptop for shits and giggles)