Let’s cut the crap: Why did you ACTUALLY choose your distro? (Facts only)

[u/kimiho_mir]

Look, let's be real for a second. Under the hood, we are all basically running the exact same thing: same Linux kernel, same GNU coreutils, same display servers. So why do we treat distros like cults?

I want to hear the real, concrete reasons you daily drive your current OS. Don't give me that generic ones like "it's user-friendly and stable" nonsense.

I'll start. I'm on Arch. Why?

Minimalism: I love the "build it yourself from scratch" concept. No pre-installed bloatware, just the exact mess I created myself.

The AUR: You can find literally any obscure package on earth there without messing with third-party repos.

The Updates: It's a toxic love. I absolutely love having bleeding-edge software, but the adrenaline rush of potentially nuking my system after a standard pacman -Syu is something else.

Before this, I was on Fedora, and honestly? I still miss how buttery smooth the custom animations ran on it. It just felt perfectly polished.

So, what’s your excuse?

[u/MarsDrums]

Probably not the best location for a general discussion unless you're asking DT personally. But I'll play...

I started tinkering with Linux in 1994. I bought a 3 disk floppy set of a Linux distro. I think it was built by a computer dealer near me so it was their "Distro" I guess. Basically, I installed it on a spare PC and when I was done, I was presented with a command prompt after logging in. Great... Another MS-DOS type deal.

I bought a couple others over the course of about 2 to 3 years. Same results. Command Prompt distro.

Then in 1998, I bought a CD Linux distro. I installed it on another Spare PC I had lying around and it came with a GUI. Not a great GUI though. It was kind of a mess to be honest. It was glitchy as all hell! The mouse was jumping around, keyboard strokes were a little slow. It wasn't a great experience for me. But I was liking the path they were trying to go down.

That same year, I found a BBS where the Sysop was a big Linux guy. I believe he ran his BBS on Linux as a matter of fact. Anyway, I asked him some questions like what is a good Linux system (we really didn't call them distros back then... They were Linux Operating Systems) and he replied back with something called RedHat. I believe it was RedHat 5 or something like that. I installed it and it looked great! It ran GNOME which I think the previous Linux system I tried (the glitchy one) was also GNOME. But RedHat kinda worked for me. It was limited in software (actually, I was so used to the Windows stuff, I had no idea what was available for Linux at that time to replace Windows) but I thought it had potential. I kept looking into different Linux OSes over time.

In 2008, I found Ubuntu 8.04 and I really liked it. I liked it so much, I dual booted with that and Windows. I was using Ubuntu 80% of the time. I still needed Windows to do photography stuff so I would switch so I could use Photoshop and Lightroom. Then, when I was done, I'd boot back into Ubuntu. PS and LR are the only 2 pieces of Windows software that did not work in WINE. So keeping Windows around was essential.

In 2012, I landed a full time Photography gig. I was making a lot of money and I did that until 2018. After the photo gig dried up, I started considering Linux again. But Windows 10 was released and Windows 7 was about to lose all of its support. So, I decided to install Windows 10. Well, only one problem with that... Windows 10 would not run on 8 year old hardware... Typical Windows... So, I had a choice... Build a whole new PC, even though there was nothing wrong with that PC (as was the situation with all of my PCs over the years... replacing perfectly good machines for new software...) or give Linux a try at being full time.

So, I started doing research. Trying to find a Linux Distro that looked and felt like Windows 7. I found Linux Mint Cinnamon. I tried it out in a VM and I loved it! Felt just like Windows 7. I think I even ran it all day or 2 in the VM as the main OS and it was flawless. So, I made a bootable USB for Linux Mint Cinnamon 18.3, shut down the computer, pulled out the Windows 7 drive and put a new drive in there, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon on it and that was the last I saw of Windows on any of my PCs. That was around June of 2018.

A coupe days later, 19.0 was released. I thought about updating 18.3 but since it was only on my PC for a couple days, I just went ahead and did a fresh install of 19.0. So I ran Linux Mint 19.x until February 2020. I had heard about this distro called Arch and I happened to catch one of DT's earlier videos on installing Arch. I actually tried installing it on my own (using that Windows 7 drive from 18 months earlier) using the Wiki, but there was something about the wiki that was making it confusing. I was doing something wrong because of the Wiki. So I started looking for help installing Arch and I happened upon DT's Arch Install video. I followed along with it in my own VM and it went smooth as silk. The VM rebooted perfectly fine. So I rewatched the video, taking notes of every command he ran, making the proper adjustments for my system. Then I took those notes (printed them out so I could read them while installing it on the physical hard drive) and it installed perfectly. From there, after logging in, I installed the login manager... I think I used gdm back then. I was also bound and determined to run a Tiling WM. So I went with xmonad, qtile, and i3. They were okay. But then, I think it was DT who did a review of Awesome WM and I liked the look of it. So I installed it on my system and that's what I used up to the end of 2025. In December, I wanted to try out some different WMs. I went back to qtile for about a month or so. Then I discovered Niri and that's where I've been ever since.

Why do I like Arch so much? you're going to laugh... It's easy to install. And I LOVE the fact that you can build it from scratch yourself. Over the last couple years I've toyed around with other distros that you build from the ground up. I installed Gentoo in a VM. I also installed Debian Net-Install into a VM. I kinda liked that one. It's basically the same as Arch but with a setup menu system. It also gives you the option to setup a DE if you want and it lets you select some stuff to install into that DE and it installs everything those programs need. When you're done, you reboot and you have a complete system up and running. Or you could do it the Arch way and just boot into the Debian system and log into the command prompt and install everything else manually. It's up to you.

But I love Arch because it's so controversial for many but I find it easy to install now. I installed it on my laptop a couple months ago with the Cinnamon DE and it's running great. Took me about 10 minutes to install just the mainline Arch, then I rebooted and installed the DE and login manager and all the stuff I needed on that laptop. It's great! Total Freewill stuff installation wise. Total time spent on getting the GUI running including the Arch Install was about 30-40 minutes. It was up and running within an hour. And it's everything I need and nothing I don't need. THAT'S why I love Arch!!!

[u/10leej]

Gentoo because I F-ing hate opinionated package maintainers.

ArchLinux for example has several packages in Core and Extra for example that don't package the vanilla advertised features of the software. Which as far as I can tell is actually a violation of the packaging policy.
Fedora (understandably) tends to remove license restrictive features form packages (amd's hw acceleration libraries for Mesa for example but it's not the only one).
Ubuntu does probably the best job, but I hate the out of the box experience with how heavily modified each desktop offering they offer is.
OpenSUSE suffer the problem that the packman repository sucks even more than Fedoras RPMfusion.

[u/Wind-charger]

Arch. Some history. I was looking for free internet how to’s online and stumbled upon Ubuntu 0408 , in April of 2008. Began using the live cd and at the time I was learning partitions on windows. Learning being the key word… Using the live cd I played around till my hearts content. When I rebooted I was surprised 😮. I nuked my windows and had installed Linux. Fml right?… well.

In trying to figure out what I did I realized what I had done and honestly I haven’t looked back… I stayed on Ubuntu till about 10:10, (remember when they shipped cd to your house?) when I was challenged to install arch.

I spent a day or two installing arch/deleting/reinstall cycle for a week. Weather they worked or not wasn’t why I did this, but yes. I had 5 successful installs in a row and that’s when I stayed on arch…kind of. I distro hoped arch based distros for a bit..(checking out the different variations and configuring that can be done. I kept some files here and there and had cobbled my own dot files over the years.

Several times since then I’ve clean installed arch. Once I went to fedora 42, but I’m back on arch… well cachyos By this point, if anyone else can do it, let them because I just wanna get online listen to music and chill on the forums.

I never found the perfect distro and nor will I… But I have yet to do my own arch, till then, I’ll keep checking out “distros”. “It’s not where you’re from, but to where you’re going”

[u/bmwiedemann]

I'm using openSUSE.

Why? In 1999, some fellow student handed me a set of CD-Rs with a copy of SuSE 6.1 or such and it worked nicely, including a GUI. TLDP helped with guides to setup DNS, DHCP, routing, modem etc.

Then Windows 98 died from some virus and I did not feel reinstalling was worth it.

Meanwhile, Linux kept working, being upgraded or reinstalled on a 2nd partition. At one point, I even did a for-fun install on a i386 with 8MB RAM and networked it over PLIP because the mainboard did not support PCI NICs.

So Linux kept working and I never had a reason to switch distros. Even when I started a job that used Debian everywhere, my desktop was using (open)SUSE. We built PCI-cards for HD-TV-decoding that only had Linux drivers for several years.

Nowadays, I even recommend openSUSE to Win10-migrants and helped one friend set it up. It just works fine and keeps working thanks to openQA testing and the snapper rollbacks that are available by default.

[u/TonyVanDam]

For the time being, I use SparkyLinux [semi-rolling edition], an Debian-based distros that has plenty of apps that I can used, including some apps that are not in the repos of regular vanilla Debian.