Asklemmy

Windows. Primarily because I play a lot of PC games and do PCVR and while Linux has come a long way it's still more of a PITA to use for a lot of things.

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 for gaming, EndeavourOS for everything else

Windows 11 because I'm a gamer

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

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

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.

Fedora Linux! <3

I use a form of Linux on all my devices except for my work laptop, but I use WSL2 mostly.

I adore Linux, but at present, I use Windows 11 on all my devices.

My main PC is primarily for gaming, with an NVIDIA GPU (which whilst much better on Linux now, still isn't perfect), so Windows works better there.

For work, also Windows 11, since I'm a software dev, creating Windows software with .NET, ASP.NET, deploying to Windows machines, IIS, using MS SQL server etc. All in Visual Studio.

The Windows ecosystem just... works better for my use-cases, regardless of how much I do like Linux!

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.

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

I just use Ubuntu 22.04 on my personal home-built PC. It just works, and I'm not interested in too much tinkering. My wife's PC also runs Ubuntu 22.04, I have a ton of raspberry Pi's with standard raspbian on them. And my work laptop runs Windows 11 and it is decent enough.

I'm happy. I can run Steam with all the games I want pretty flawlessly, with some minor tinkering sometimes. But it is a solid experience.

I dual boot OpenSuse and Windows. Windows being the main installation. I think I may try to go full AMD next build and main OpenSuse the main installation. I just need to get used to DarkTable instead of Lightroom since thats been the only think shackling me to Windows thus far.

I run Arch Linux with KDE for my workstation, and Fedora for my ThinkPad. My server runs Rocky Linux and I plan to get another (possibly in the cloud).

Arch Linux and Windows 10 dual boot.

Generally, I like Linux because it's FOSS and I can use i3wm. Arch Linux specifically because the AUR makes installing software really easy. Almost everything I use is available there.

I keep Windows for programs that don't work under Wine. I haven't touched this disk for some time because all of my Windows programs work on Wine now.

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.

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.

Windows 10 on my desktop. I game and work on it, and there are applications for my job that I can't get to work on Linux (even on Wine).

My laptop is on Linux (Endeavour OS). It's my portable device and I don't use it for work so Linux, imho, is my best choice. It's pretty old as well.

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 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