Linux

I'm an old coot and comes from preGUI area. My first unix experience were on 80x25 amber terminal. Then X came, I used mwm/twm/fvwm and things like this, it was very tricky to configure to your taste, mainly with config file, you wanted your xeyes, xload, xbiff, xclock etc at this place, transparent, no border, etc, very complicated. Linux didn't exist.

Then Windows came... and kind of dominated the world with win3/95/98/etc. and at the time linux desktop were still not perfect + you had all kind of driver problems/missing.

As a lot of people I was used to windows GUI so I chose Xfce (also because France). Simple GUI, a button menu bottom left, an app bar, and systray icons and clock bottom right. Don't need anything else.

I tried LFS, Arch, Cinnamon Mint, I tried Ubuntu, I tried tile, but nah, the simpler the better, Xfce it is.

I am using MX Linux for years now, Debian based, always up to date, .deb packages, no systemd, no snap, no flatpak.

I use Devuan and TDE because the setup is so incredible boring and dusty that i do not have to get acquainted with anything new (SystemD, Wayland... whatever hipster WM is currently cool) and keep working with the tools i like.

I use Arch with Gnome because this is something I've installed years ago and it just keeps working with no issues.

I use Arch with hyprland, waybar, walker, pcman-qt, Kitty.

Reason is I hate mouse or touchpads I try to use them less. Hyprland is a tiling wm but I am not a fan of tiling at all. Most of the time I switch through workspaces with command+tab and only one window on each workspace.

When I was new to the Linux desktop world (late 90s to 200x) I tried lots of different distros and (X11) window managers and tools and whatnot. Changed themes a lot. And so on. And I think there's value in all that, because it expands your horizon of what's possible on the desktop, how different UI/UX paradigms work out in practice for you, and you learn how to use different environments.

On the other hand, there's also value in having a consistent, well-integrated desktop environment. It can mean less "pain points" in various circumstances, and it's also efficient when multiple programs share the same libraries or code base instead of having separate tools all around.

In the end, it comes down to what works best for you. But this might also change over time. For example I'm really considering switching to Cosmic once it's mature. I'm also considering taking a look at Niri because it seems well thought-out. But currently I feel cozy using Plasma at home and Gnome at work because Plasma is currently the least-annoying and at work I still use Gnome because it's been historically more stable than Plasma for me. I've tweaked Plasma's hotkeys so they work more like Gnome's and since I also need to use a couple of Windows-based systems at work I've also configured common Windows shortcuts like Super+L, Super+E, Super+R so that they all behave the same everywhere.

Oh, and my distro is Arch everywhere because I've used it for ages now and I like its technical simplicity, stability and modularity. It's the one distro that gets in my way the least.

I think one should learn enough to be flexible and be able to use everything, while also not being too narrow-minded and just focus on one solution too much. What works best for you now might not be the best choice for you in a couple of years.

I use mint that I haven't updated in years because one time I tried and it failed so I stopped trying. It's my old work Thinkpad that I now use exclusively to run weekly events. It's old and heavy and I needed a more lightweight OS than windows.

For my gaming rig I use Mint Cinnamon with the Xanmod kernel and kisak-mesa PPA for bleeding edge performance but otherwise a very low-maintenance, convenient system.

For my personal laptop (ThinkPad T480s) I use Arch with KDE. For my various mini PCs used as servers, I use primarily Debian derivatives, except for my Mac Mini which runs Asahi Arch so I could optimize the use of its 8G of RAM.

I use Mint, with Cinnamon. It looks like Windows, and 99% of the time works like it too. The only issue I have is the lack of good small accessibility tools, and the difficulty of using arbitrary executables. It's easy to use, and it works reliably.

The more Windows-like an OS is, the happier I am to use it. Note that Win11 is not very Windows-like in my view. It cuts out power user functions and adds so much useless bloat and tracking that I don't want to ever touch it. If I ever have to, outside of work, the first day or six will be spent with the thing offline, basically deleting out half of the OS and remodeling the half that's left.

Used it at work and wanted to learn on my own. Then installed Ubuntu as a noob, and was like "why tf is everyone still using Windows?"

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.)

Well, I use Void Linux, Fedora, and NetBSD. All for different purposes. I just love the freedom to modify my system 'till my heart's content. I'm generally a tiling WM (sdorfehs) on laptops and openbox/lxde on desktop.

I appreciate minimal clean code.

I used to run SUSE on a laptop i only used once every three years or so. Because of the "full open source" principle i couldn't run a lot of online Videos because the codecs were free but proprietary. When i decided to get a new computer as my tower was getting 15, i wanted to switch to a Linux distro as my daily system. Bought a laptop without windows preinstalled and decided to roll with Manjaro as it has KDE and was recommended as suitable for gaming.

Works fine for the most part. The last wave of updates caused some fuss with the desktop, but i can just do everything important from the terminal, while waiting for the next release.

i started with slackware ~2003 and moved to gentoo in 2005. it was very transparent to me as a newbie. use flags and compilation from source were way simpler to me than mysterious precompiled binaries. also ndiswrapper worked with my wireless chipset on gentoo. that helped

i use gentoo now from arch becuase i wanted to use portage and be able to control dependancys and i run chadwm (fork of dwm) for added features and the rest of the things i use like st dmenu neovim all are part of the workflow ive made

Windows doesn't have a real choice of desktop environments. So I moved to Linux 15 years ago. I'm not in IT and always use a mouse. Importantly for me, I've never needed the CLI, despite people telling me that's impossible. Plasma lets me tweak it to my needs. I use Kubuntu, yet don't care about what's below the desktop environment. Happy to change distros.

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 Mint, with little customization.

Mint basically gets out of my way, I care about the ability to get my work done.

I also prefer the windows paradigm rather than the Mac paradigm. IMHO Mint does it better than windows now.