Asklemmy

Arch Linux on my main PC because it 1) is not Ubuntu and 2) has very up to date drivers and software packages which means running the latest hardware isn't a problem. I have an Intel Arc A770 in my main PC and the last time I tried running even Debian unstable on it, it didn't have graphics drivers at all. Also, the AUR is an incredible thing with pretty much any software you can think of being made available for Arch by the community even if it isn't in the official repos.

My personal PCs all run Linux Mint my work PC is Win 11 because we need to use Ms Office for certain things.

Windows because my favorite games don't work on it and neither does any of Adobe's apps.
I'm thinking about buying a used mac because I'll need it for crossplatform testing of apps.

Arch linux - Love the bleeding edge side of it, as well as the AUR, and wanted something with a bit more learning potential than Fedora, which is what I was previously using.

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.

Fedora, because it works well out of the box, and I like GNOME.

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.

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

Arch because of the neofetch

I'm using Linux Mint on my laptop simply because it's the one I'm most comfortable and in love with.

Windows 10, mainly because two factors: I use a lot of macros on office at work, and Clip Studio Paint... But I'm considering going full Linux once Windows 10 goes EoL, since CSP is going with their subscription model I plan on using Krita. I just need to see if I can use my work files with office+wine

Gentoo gang

Trying to balance all the libraries and programs I need for ham radio, astronomy, CAD/CAM, emulation (VMs and consoles), containers, gaming, flight simulation, and software development basically requires the granularity of fine tuning it provides.

Windows 11 on my gaming desktop because it's still difficult to beat in gaming workloads (although Valve is doing promising things with SteamOS along with the advancements in Proton and Wine) . macOS on my school laptop due to the battery life and great developer tools along with it's integration with iPhone/Airpods. Arch on my project laptop because it can run almost anything I can download off of Github and it has a great software library with the AUR. I'm not really loyal to any operating system, I just use what I think is the right tool for the job.

Windows 10. I got a Ryzen 5900x that works fine on an old bios version. Upgrading to windows 11 requires me to upgrade the bios or get tTPM stutters. However, the new bios versions reduce the (single core) performance...So I'm sticking with windows 10 for now. I have windows 11 on my laptop and don't mind it. Tried Linux multiple times over the past 15 years, but it always kills itself within weeks. As a server it works well though.

Windows 10 for machine learning and gaming, and Mint Linux for almost everything else. I fucking hate the NVIDIA/Microsoft monopoly with CUDA/etc but they're pretty much the only game in town at this point

My daily driver is a MacBook but I have other machines running Windows and Pop! OS (System 76)

GNU Guix System. 100% free software, focus on reproducible builds, declarative configuration, packages are just Scheme modules stored in a git repository. I've written packages for guix (I helped with the Icedove package) and find it to be fairly straightforward once I understood the syntax and basic data structures.

One particularly nifty feature of guix is that you can specify a commit or version number to build a package with, so if the package is out of date you can still get the latest version (assuming it still builds of course).

* tips Fedora*

Windows 11. VR sim racing isn't good on Linux yet.

There's a lot I love about Linux, and when I ran a potato computer and ran my own business and had a PS2/3/4 for gaming, Linux was awesome. Got into Destiny back in the D1 days so when I built a PC in 2020 I definitely wanted to play D2, which meant I had to run Windows. By that point I had also been running Windows at work because I need a lot of Adobe and Excel so it wasn't too bad to switch.

Garuda Linux on my laptop, because I need a system that can play my absurd steam library, emulate like a champ, compile a wide variety of things easily, and support an array of random other tasks like media dumping and ham radio programming. It's treated me well thus far.

I dual boot Windows and Arch Linux. I only keep Windows around for some games that don't work in Linux currently, as well as the occasional software that doesn't have a Linux equivalent (or the equivalent has issues such as compatibility) though. Mostly everything else is done in Linux, and I'm quite happy with it!

As for the "why" on Linux, I've always loved interacting in a CLI environment, and enjoy the dev experience on Linux. And as cliche as it sounds, I do like "owning" my system and feeling like I actually get to make executive decisions as to how/what it runs.

Fedora 36 on both my desktop and laptop. (that's GNU/Linux). Its not the latest because I have outdated hardware. Occasionally dual booth Windows for Valorant and FL Studio.

As to why. I enjoy an Operating System where I can change everything. For me this is Linux. I customize to the point where everything works then I don't touch it. I used to be obsessed with changing stuff. But this way I have it the way I like it. If anyone is curious, go check out !unixporn@lemmy.ml

Void Linux on my Thinkpad and Thinkstation. On Pinephone and Pinetab I'm running postmarketOS. I really like postmarketOS and using apk, so if I were to get a new laptop or every change the distro on my laptop or desktop, then I might try Alpine. On raspberry pi 3, it's raspbian. I use that mainly to run pi-hole and pivpn.

I distro hopped for a little while, but then settled on Void. It does what I need and was easy to get set up how I want. It's a rolling release and I haven't ever had any big issues with upgrading. The worst issue I've had was when they recently removed pipewire-media-session and switched to wireplumber. After checking a couple posts on reddit and on void's documentation, I got it set up the recommended way without any trouble and audio is working fine.

edit: wanted to add that my Thinkpad also has OpenBSD as a dual boot option, but I haven't booted into it in a long time. One day I'd like to try a BSD as a server(not on a laptop, of course.) Also, the Thinkstation has Windows 10/Void dual boot, but I never boot into Windows.

Mac. I tried linux and while the future is promising, I had too many things go poorly for me to fully adopt it at the moment. Windows has been going downhill for a long time now, but I think windows 11 is the true point of no return. So I use mac, which feels like a nice middle ground between the two in terms of features, usability, etc.

I use a wide variety of machines, but my main desktop runs windows because I pretty much do nothing on it but play games. I have installed arch on another drive but for me an OS is either one or the other, so I mostly stick with windows because, like I said, games just work on there. That being said, I am in love with arch from using it on my school laptop and would love nothing more for everything made for windows to just work on arch.

Edit: Because another comment mentioned it, another reason why I stay on windows is for VR

I use Solus OS . Pretty much the perfect distro for me , I have tried so many distros (ubuntu , mint , endeavour , fedora etc) but no one felt as smooth and snappier to me as solus . Eopkg(it's package manager) might be limited but has all the softwares I need m so no complaining from my side . Also I like how fast it is . Solus is a rolling release distro and is still very stable , never encountered any problems with it . I was afraid that it may die and started looking for alternatives ,sadly never found one as good as solus to me . But thankfully Solus's founder and buddies of budgie's lead are back and making sure the project isn't dead.

Windows 11. Because my PC comes with a 12th gen Intel processor, and from what I've heard Windows 10 doesn't really know how to address the P and E cores properly. I've tried both Linux and macOS, they're both not my cup of tea, and I keep finding myself crawling back to Windows.

On my old laptop, I was using Windows 10.

I'd still be on Windows 2K if it weren't for everything. Stayed with 7 as long as I could. Given up caring now.

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.

Windows 11. I play games and my PC is hooked up to an HDR tv, so it's easier than 10. I also don't want to be left behind on tech/UI because of my stubborness.

I don't think it's an improvement over 10, especially the Start Menu. I've had to do some 3rd party tweaking and change to Enterprise edition so I can get rid of "recommended" stuff.

I've had some small experience with Ubuntu and Linux in general via a laptop server and seedbox but I just find it too bothersome to do small tasks compared to Windows. I'm sure it'd change eventually but I don't want to have to look up a command every time I want to change something.

Windows 10 for software compatibility and gaming, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Ubuntu for everything that has to do with programming. I think it's the best of both worlds.

I used to have a dual-boot system (Windows and Ubuntu) but WSL is easier to configure and very convenient.

Ubuntu at home (with sway), and unfortunately macOS for work (with its badly-broken and nonsensical window management)

Both Windows 11 and Arch Linux with KDE. I am using my PC mostly for gaming and drawing. Since almost all games in my steam library work without tinkering and Krita and Aseprite work like a charm I rarely use Windows 11 at the moment.