Debian stable (ok, writing this on Debian Trixie which is not stable yet, but nonetheless works w/o trouble in a virtual machine).
I am using Debian for work and on my servers.
Why Debian? Because for my use cases there are no real alternatives at this moment.
- I need stable support for Aarch64 and AMD64, which already rules out nearly every other distribution
- For desktops I use a highly customized Gnome, which takes some work and my workflow depends on a few plugins, which rules out Fedora
- For work I need some 3rd party software repositories which again rule out fast moving distributions and other non mainstream distributions
- By now I think I run Debian and distributions based on Debian for nearly 3 decades, everything I need works stable and good enough at this moment and I accumulated a lot of knowledge about how things work in Debian
- Some of my hardware needs workarounds (not because it is too new), and again I know my way around Debian and how to patch/fix things for my hardware
- It is nice that I can use Debian for my desktops and my servers on all hardware I own, I would not want to have to learn different Linux systems for desktops and servers or have different versions of software (think Fedora vs. RHEL/CentOS/Alma etc.)
Every 6 month I’ll boot Fedoras live cd and play around with the newest Gnome/KDE, but seriously, for at least the last 5 years I never feel like essential improvements are pushed in the newest iterations of Gnome/KDE and I can happily wait the maximum of 2 years until they are released with Debian.
Saying that, I also own a Steam Deck and as an entertainment/media station I totally love what Valve is doing there. I would also be totally happy to run a De-Googled ChromeOS if it would support all the platforms/software etc. I need. For containers I’ll also happily use Alpine Linux, if it is possible, but again, I’ll mostly default to Debian simply because I know my way around.
In the end, an operating system is just a necessary evil to allow me to do what I want to do with a computer. As long as I have a stable OS which I can tweak to my liking/needs automatically and central package management, I am good. (Unless it is your hobby to play around with your operating system ;-)).
Amen.