I personally use Ubuntu for my ‘just works’ and Arch for my lower level i want to tweak the hell out of things.
I loved gentoo in the past but don’t have the patience for compiling anymore.
Thoughts?
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I use Mint with the Mate DE. I switched to Mint after Ubuntu changed over to Unity. I’ve tried RH, OpenSUSE and Mandriva but never really liked any of them and I never really felt the need to torture myself with Gentoo. 
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I use most of the time debian. But i will test Arch Linux on my laptop and cent os as debian replacement in the future for servers.
I use mostly Debian. But am planning on trying some other distros in a VM.
I use a mix of things. right now I’ve settled on kubuntu as a daily use distro and manjaro as the distro where I do GPU passthrough. I like arch-based things because of the kernel utilities and pacman to a lesser extent, I’m not a big fan of the multitude of flags instead of more human readable commands. all that being said I want to try out Gentoo because zfs-dkms on arch is a disaster and I have wanted to try out the whole “compile things yourself” shenanigans for a while. on servers I like debian if it’s for home use.
I never could get into Linux Mint. I know lots of people love it but basically can’t stand any of their Window Managers… (Cinnamon / Mate ). I like Gnome 3, so when I run “ubuntu” I don’t actually use unity that is a POS IMO. Thankfully next version of Ubuntu drops it completely.
@Oli to each his own naturally but personally can’t stand Centos. It’s too dusty old the day it gets released.
The whole argument for Centos is that its secure and locked down and tested…and every company I’ve worked at usually installed Centos then installs a 3rd party repo to have modern packages on there. defeating the whole point of having Centos.
Just my opinion…and biases. (: Any BSD users? I can rant about what I don’t like about that as well. 
I have mint on my second pc. it has the “just works” of ubuntu and a couple things improved for new users. the reason I have it on there is so I use the distro I’d tell someone new to install. btw I kinda like FreeBSD and TrueOS. My go to for a web browsing machine is OpenBSD (because overpowered is good :P). they are working really hard to make it secure.
LOL, wow… so I haven’t heard of TrueOS before and I do want to give it a go, but jesus these guys are so humble.
"What makes TrueOS different? TrueOS is based on the legendary security and stability of FreeBSD. "
not false though. how many times have you read “widespread vulnerability of freebsd leaves the majority of users exposed”? also, what it is missing in capabilitiesor functionality, it has in stability. it’s kinda like centos in that way
Oh agreed. OpenBsd and freebsd are rock solid for security. It’s a balance like always usability vs security and what’s more important to you.
opensuse almost always. If opensuse isn’t available, I choose either randomly or the distro where package Y is working (which I need)
I know it since I began with Linux, and will most probably stick with it. I tried quite a bunch, but always went back to the chameleon
Yeah, I saw that Ubuntu was dropping Unity. Perhaps I’ll try the next version.
I dont mind Mate. It feels like Gnome 2 which I liked. Cinnamon feels too much like KDE for my taste, though I know it was forked from Gnome 3.
Kali for work. Arch-based distros for pleasure.
Well, I use MATE with the Compiz window manager. That’s how I got into Linux, I really just love the desktop effects. Evolved from just using fire effects to make some sense into the effects and feel comfortable with my configuration. I would love to make an Ubuntu-based distro with the Cairo dock environment and Compiz.
I’ve tried Arch-based distro’s but basically, Arch without knowledge is a crappy experience. I had trouble with a simple task like watching videos and didn’t know my configuration so I could research it, for me Arch is a distro where you should have control over what is installed and I still haven’t got the time to study all these. Drivers, codecs and such and then the desktop environment and how to customize it, setting things like periodical fsrtim. And generally making all the decisions for a system. Maybe I should see what’s LFS about and see if that’s a good guide to get to know what to do in Arch.
MATE is a great replacement for Unity with Synapse (with tracker-miner-fs) and same indicators can be used, I like I can copy the selected text in mate-terminal to clipboard automatically.
ah…effects…I use the KDE cube animation to switch between desktops and I love it for some reason. it seems childish but it’s just a bit of fun while using my computer
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I’m on Mint with KDE desktop, but I’ve been a long-term KDE users since the early days on KDE, when you often had to compile it yourself.
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currently using TrueOS and like it for work
Currently have Mint Cinnamon running on my desktop at home. Have tried Mate and Gnome 3, but like the ‘just works’ factor with Cinnamon. I spend 99% of my time in the terminal or browser anyway. I have CentOS,Ubuntu, Kali, and OpenSuse VMs. CentOS is my goto for servers, and I actually keep it with the stable packages unless it’s a throwaway test machine.
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Well took the plunge and installed TrueOS in a VM. Pretty painless. Also installed Libre Office in TrueOS. To bad Canonical does not make Libre Office look as nice.