Assuming you want a distrowar, leftacenter said it best, whatever you use is best. Assuming you want a recommendation, Fedora or Mint.

I run OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my gaming desktop and Fedora (KDE spin) on everything else, including my 88 year old mother's mini computer plugged into her TV. My friend, who just jumped ship from Windows due to multiple install fails of Win11, runs Mint and loves it.

I've done enough to just want things to work. Not touching Arch, but love their wiki. No more kernel configs for me.

Bona fides (early on I distro hopped like crazy). I've used: Slackware (my very first distro in 1998) Red Hat (after I gave up fighting X on Slack) SuSE, OpenSuSE Fedora Ubuntu and derivatives (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Hanna Montana Linux, Christian Linux, Satanic Linux (had to install it over Christian Linux)) MX Linux Mepis Linux Mint (both Ubuntu derived and Debian derived) Debian Gentoo Sorceror and Lunar AntiX Damn Small Linux Tiny Linux Puppy Linux Knoppix Mandriva Scientific Linux Gecko PCLinuxOS CrunchBang Source Mage OpenWRT Raspberry Pi OS System Rescue Kanotix SLAX SteamOS

Plus: Android & Lineage FreeBSD OpenBSD QNX OpenSolaris

And: Free DOS DOS Windows 3.11 - 10, NT, and 2000 (Win 2000 was the most reliable version of Windows, Win 7 was the best) Apple DOS Macintosh System Software 4 - 10.1 Atari DOS Atari GEM Desktop (loved the ST)

Finally: Haiku

1. This is my linux. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

2. My linux is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

3. My linux, without me, is useless. Without my linux, I am useless. I must boot my linux true. I must boot faster than windows who is trying to be buggy. I must boot him before it boots. I will …

4. My linux and myself know that what counts in this world is not the times we boot, the noise of our bootsounds, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the linux computer that count. We will install….

5. My linux is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its repos and its flatpaks. I will ever guard it against the ravages of non updating as I will ever guard my legs, my arms, my eyes and my heart against damage. I will keep my linux clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will ….

6. Before God(s)(?), I swear this creed. My linux and myself are the defenders of my convictions. We are the masters of our computers. We are the saviors of my digital life.

7. So be it, until linux is the world’s most used OS and there is no walled gardens, but only peace!!

I use Arch, btw, but I don't consider it the best (yes I do.) I could easily transition to Fedora, for example (I would never do that,) and be completely happy (I would rather continually hit my head with the metal stapler gun on my desk.)

Hannah Montana Linux

Does what I want and gets out of my way.

Bazzite just works, it runs every game I have with zero fuss, it's easy to run Windows programs / emulators / local LLMs, AND it's basically unbreakable.

Mint is Ubuntu minus everything that makes Ubuntu annoying. That's why I like it.

I considered to go back to Debian but... eh, I'm too old and impatient for that. Nowadays I mostly want things that work out of the box.

NixOS. My entire config is source-controlled and I can easily roll back to a previous boot image if something breaks like cough Nvidia drivers. I also use it for my home router and all self-hosted services.

It isn't, it is the least bad

I don't know that it is objectively the best - but its the best fit for me right now (LMDE).

I've been enjoying EndeavourOS over the past three years. It works wonderfully out of the box at default settings, and was really easy for me to use and set up to my liking with minimal know-how needed.

It also works really well on the variety of machines I have in my home. My desktop, modded Chromebook, and my husband's laptop.

It's allowed me to get more familiar and confident with the command line, and enough so that I've switched to Sway from XFCE (and previously KDE).

Because it was my first distro that got me away from Windows. And yes, it's Mint.

I'm convinced it isn't.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_is_the_best

Because I like compiling everything from source for a 0.2% speed improvement

This week alone I've used Arch, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Fedora. Its Arch. By a short way, and mostly thanks to the wiki. Tbh they are all converging, and I go with KDE variants when I use a GUI and no distro does too much to customise it

Mine's the best, because it fits with what I want. Might not be your best, but it's mine.

It works, has the packages I need and they are up-to-date

Void made Linux fun again for me. It gets so much right with the rolling release model.

openSUSE Slowroll and Secureblue are my favorites ATM. Slowroll for gaming, Secureblue for mobile device. Both are hardened for security because that matters to me.

Can't say it's the best, but I love Alpine. It's light, fast, versatile and easy to use, runs on anything, and despite it being used mostly in containers and VMs, it makes for a great desktop distro aswell. :)

Because I can hit "next" a couple of time and have a working install

You mean my distros?

Different distros are the best for different purposes.

My Fedora is the best for my laptop because it just works and all the hardware is supported.

My Arch is the best because it's a super fine tuned setup that prevents distractions and doesn't waste memory or CPU doing things I don't care about.

My mint is the best because it's simple, stable, beautiful out of the box.

My debian is the best because servers are no nonsense.

My puppy Linux was the best when I was a developer for the distro because it was the smallest lightest and fastest distro I've ever used.

Etc.

I use Arch since approximately 2006 or so. I like its stability (yes!), performance, rapid updates and technical simplicity. It never stands in my way and it's fairly simple to understand, administer and modify. It's probably the most convenient OS I've ever used - sure it takes time/effort to set it up but once you're past that it's smooth sailing. It also doesn't change dramatically over the years (it doesn't need to) so it's easy to keep up with its development. Plus, I have a custom setup script for it that installs and sets up all of the basics, so if I ever need to reinstall, I'm not starting from zero.

I am eyeing NixOS as "the next step" but didn't yet experiment with it too much. Arch is just too comfy to use and the advantages that NixOS brings aren't yet significant enough for me to make any kind of switch to it, but I consider NIxOS (as well as its related technologies like the Nix package manager) to be the most interesting and most advanced things in the Linux world currently.

If you're reading this as a newbie Linux user: probably don't use any of the two mentioned above (yet). They're not considered entry-level stuff, unless you're interested in learning low-level (as in: highly technical) Linux stuff from the start already. NixOS/Nix in particular is fairly complex and can be a challenge even for veteran Linux admins/users to fully understand and utilize well. Start your journey with more common desktop distros like Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu.

It's extremely stable, and countless other distros are derived from this.

CachyOS with NiriWM. Cachy is Arch with none of the install drama. The performance tuning makes it blazing fast on older hardware. Installs with no bloat.

Niri is superior to Hyprland in my opinion because it's a scrolling tiling WM that is super intuitive and fast.

For server workloads, however, not much beats pure Debian. It's stable, well supported, and has a huge package library.

I do not consider Arch the best. Artix is better because is is systemd-free. I have not switched yet.

I started with Mandrake back in 2000 and used Red Hat at school. In 2004 Ubuntu was released and I adopted it for life. I switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu to Ubuntu MATE to Kubuntu up to this day. It's the best because of all the quality of life additions, the stability of the LTS releases, the amount of widespread documenation, and general size of the community of users. This makes it a lot more easier to use and get help to troubleshoot any problems. So far it's been mostly a problem free and easy experience.

Until recently...

I just discovered Zorin OS and started messing around with it in a VM. I gotta say it's of of the best, most polished Gnome desktop experiences I've had so far with their free core version. While I love KDE for it's desktop experience being the closest to Windows there is, I usually find it has WAY too many customizations to a fault. Some people like this, but I find that the more you mess with configs, the more prone to problems it gets. I also find Gnome to be more well put together and well integrated. The fact the customization options are limited means I spend more time doing what I need to do than messing around with getting my desktop just right. I just hate the default Gnome destop and whatever paradigm they tried to make. That's why I've stuck with Kubuntu for a while. But with Zorin, I think they found the sweet spot. This might be my next install and I might recommend it to anyone who wants to get into Linux over Mint.

I use NixOS, btw (don't you see that glorious gif?). It's the only distro that is actually different compared to other distros. It's not just another package manager, another ubuntu skin, or a different desktop environment. If you learn how to configure it, you can easily redo breaking changes or install an exact copy of your system on a different device. You can configure all you want and you will never ever have to worry.

Also has better flex than Arch users.

Zorin is boring. uses ubuntu stable, out of the box distro so you can do anything you want to do right after installation (including installing a windows program with play on linux but also like burning a disk), emulates windows. Add kde if you want to spice it up (distro really needs to change to kde out of box.). If someone is from windows and does not want to learn all that linux stuff they can pretty much go for most things right away and they can use the software store, choose the debian download for anything they find online if its available and if not they can download the windows right click and say install with play on linux. Its the lazy mans linux and im plenty lazy.