Asklemmy

Depends. My laptop has Windows 10 as a backup, but runs current Linux mint w/cinnamon DE

My desk pc is on Windows 7, with a secondary drive I can boot from that's tuning running mint as well.

The household pc is running debian w/plasma because my wife likes it better than cinnamon. I tried mint on it, and gor whatever reason, it didn't "like" mint but debian works fine.

There's also the old PC I used to use as my writing computer. It's running debian with xfce because it doesn't get used by anyone else, and it's slow as hell with plasma or cinnamon. I don't really use it much, but nobody wanted the damn thing, so I keep it set up for the occasions when I need to be able to lock a door so I'm not interrupted. Which is when I have writer's block, not the other thing lol.

Arch because of the neofetch

Ubuntu guest, Windows host. Windows - good enough for most things. Ubuntu - open to neglect, unlike Arch. Easy to work with, i3wm is amazing. Allows me to do actual “work” without having to learn how people program on windows.

Debian Testing with XFCE. When I need Wayland (for testing my app), i use Sway.

1. Performance. I'm stuck with an old computer right now.
2. No reliance on quirky black-box packages. It is less 'wrapped' unlike Mint, and more 'wrapped', unlike Arch. Compared to Arch (btw), Debian has some distro-management apps, like update-alternatives and synaptic. Also, it breaks less often, provided the system is used properly.

Also, I use Debian Stable on a VPS, because you don't want to sacrifice security to bleeding edge.

Linux Mint (Cinnamon) as my daily driver, and if I absolutely must use Windows for something then it's LTSC IoT edition (at least then it is usable!)

I use windows 11 on the main PC. Ease of use for everyone in the household plus easy access to mainstream gaming. I use Linux Mint on my personal laptop. I'm not much of a power user these days so Mint has everything I need for my slightly older laptop.

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.

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

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

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.

manjaro and win11 for some obscure things I need it for.

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.

Fedora. Why? Because its the best!

Zorin OS right now

Arch Linux

• AUR
• Up to date packages + AUR, so no need to manually install things or search for third party repositories
• Arch wiki
• I started using it and it works
• etc.

Windows 11

• laptop ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I had a windows 7 desktop that I muddled through the process of setting up a dual boot with Ubuntu. I could not get certain programs to work that I needed to use for work, so just left that partition in place and went back to Windows 7. Partly because I'm not OS tech savvy and not certain how to remove it and partly because I have a new computer that is Windows 10 and is my daily driver now. The Windows 7/Ubuntu computer is now just sitting in the spare room running an RTL-SDR dongle using Windows 7 as an AIS feeder. I'd set that up on the Ubuntu partition but haven't had a chance to learn how to do that yet.

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.

Linux since Windows XP. Windows Update broke me.

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

windows 10 desktop PC for ableton live, linux mint xfce laptop for productivity

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

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.

Windows 11 because I'm a gamer

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.

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.

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

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.