Which Linux distribution do you use?

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Your Linux distribution of choice says a lot about you. Of course, one of the many great things about Linux is the diversity of options you have to choose between. Maybe you like a slimmed down minimalist option. Maybe having all of the bells and whistles is important to you. Or maybe you just prefer a distribution that you find easy to use.

Whatever your preferences, chances are, there's at least one distribution out there that's a perfect fit for your needs. Because of the huge number of choices, which we couldn't possibly list all here, we relied up DistroWatch.com to provide us with a starting point of the ten highest ranking distributions from the past twelve months.

"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."

When we asked this question in 2015, over four thousand of you took our poll and many others joined the conversation in the comments.

So let us know: Which is your favorite distribution for daily use? And if your favorite isn't in the list, let us know in the comments below. More importantly, we'd curious to hear why you pick your chosen distribution: let us know why you think your distribution is a great pick!

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
8945 votes tallied
Mint
13% (1121 votes)
Debian
11% (965 votes)
Ubuntu
23% (2058 votes)
openSUSE
11% (990 votes)
Fedora
12% (1052 votes)
Mageia
1% (65 votes)
Manjaro
3% (225 votes)
CentOS
8% (683 votes)
Arch
13% (1182 votes)
Android-x86
0% (28 votes)
Other (tell us in the comments)
6% (576 votes)

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252 Comments

Puppy on older laptop.

Linux Lite on somewhat newer laptop.

Raspbian on a Pi.

elementary OS on Desktops
NixOS on Servers

Slackware

PCLinuxOS is the only one I use at home anymore

elementary

elementary

On my main pc I'm running LMDE2, my media-pc runs under openELEC, my netbook is manjaro and I also have a WIN10 pc for testing purposes.

Parabola,Trisquel,Antergos all with gnome-shell

Red Hat in the old time...was a gentle mess ... with kind of links '(...I'm not a specialist now) with GNU ...KDE ...but now I have lefta bit , the pinguin of linux was the favorite pics of my 10years old daughters ...Think we both all have some rests in the mind . I'm french and sometimes I'm not easy enough with the english ,but now one of them s in Chicago ...

I have used many distributions over the years, but since a couple of years I stick to openSUSE: Tumbleweed for my own laptops, Leap for my parents.

Both very stable, even Tumbleweed with its rapid progress. Yast is a very good tool and the KDE desktop is solid and fast.

I use Ubuntu on my desktop and Clearos (based on Centos) on my personal server.

Peppermint OS

Gentoo: the best dependencies tree (stable and updated). Best distribution because it allows keep a tunned Operating System for a specific platform.

i use pclinuxos full monty.

I run MX Linux-MX-15.

Kali Linux! But the others are great, too.

I use Pinguy, based on Ubuntu and Mint

Dual boot 64 bit laptop Running W10 / Ubuntu Linux. :)

I use archlinux on ;
my laptop
my work PC
my desktop pc

&
Centos on my servers

Deepin

I run elementary OS Freya.

Antergos. It provides me an Arch-based system that is >.< this close to how I'd install it myself, but with a handy installer.

Arguably, they make better choices than I would for some things.

I use Oracle Linux

Scientific Linux

Opensuse 13.2 (Leap was broken so I reverted) for everyday use. AVlinux for my audio and video work. Ubuntu Studio with XFCE on netbook. Looking seriously at Mageia 5 for day to day

I use Manjaro on my primary laptop. I used to use Arch but didn't have time to install and configure it for a new machine.

Solus Operating System 1.0 64-bit

CentOS 6 (Linux-C6) port in FreeBSD would not exactly be a bare-metal installation. It's really quite useful tho - running an installation of the Modelio modeling platform and of OxygenXML via Linux-C6 emulation in FreeBSD 10 on a notebook.

There's also Debian 8.2 installed in a VirtualBox virtual guest OS, to run Zotero and Modelio w/o further ports hacking LoL

Speaking from some experience with Debian, personally I'm really impressed with the level of user support available in Debian and the extent of the Debian packaging system - from debuild to apt-get, it's quite a software component infrastructure, seriously. Not to start a flame war, but In building ports on FreeBSD with Poudriere and installing the built ports with portupgrade, the seamless upgrades are quite nice, I think.

Missing the aptitude tool, though

Arch with i3-wm.

I use Elementary also.

i use LXLE. works fine WB0ZUR

Slackware

Antergos. Best Arch distro. Why not manjaro? Because they've done a lot of things there and its not possible to install nvidia prime because of mhwd.

Mint (voted) on primary home machine. LUbuntu on laptops and my r&d machine. Fedora in virtualbox. and Centos on my home data server.

Gentoo Linux

I use Salix, and I love it.

antergos on my laptop and kubuntu on my daily driver box

Using "others", the GREAT, the AWESOME, elementary OS 0.3.2 codename "Freya", customized of course ;)

i have tried many linux distros but now finally using Arch Linux (great experience)

Mageia

Mageia in desktop and notebook with KDE

I tried some distros like Fedora, Ubuntu and ..., But i am really happy with Linux Mint! Now i am running mint on my Desktop and Laptop

I use linux after 2000 started with RedHat, after Fedora 3 after ubuntu, suse, archlinux and again fedora. But finally I am using CentOS 7 which is more stable for servers and desktop.

I'm currently running Linux Mint and I don't think I'm gonna change it in the near future. I find it very stable, it supports nvidia optimus wich is great for my laptop: I can choose between my cpu or my gpu to run graphic-demanding tasks (I make physics simulations, I don't need my gpu when I'm coding but I do need it when I'm checking geometries). I do need to close my session everytime I have to switch between cpu and gpu but that's not a big deal. Mint "fits my laptop", that's the only thing I really care about right now.

We use Xubuntu but sell computers with Mint XFCE because of reliability.

Ubuntu 16.04. It works with blissful transparency, so i never have to think about computing, only about my work. And i thank you for running the survey.

OpenSuse for over a decade, now. Tho, Mint on occasion when a situation calls for a deb distro.

Deepin !

Ubuntu MATE !

Lubuntu on old PC. Raspian on Rpi.