Linux

I use NixOS on my main PC.

If you want to use NixOS, you have to be willing to read.

Two things are especially difficult:

Coding: You will have to learn the Nix-specific way for everything you do. How does Nodejs work in NixOS? How does GCC work in NixOS? How does my IDE work in NixOS?

Using unofficial packages: The nix repos are very large and you'll most likely find everything you need there (or on flatpak/flathub). But if something isn't there, the easiest way tends to be packaging it as a nix package yourself. And that's something many people probably don't want to do.

The coding thing is annoying enough that I may switch away from NixOS at some point.

Other than that, NixOS is great.

Solus - get updates all the time, don't have to think about reinstalling and don't have to pay attention if an update could break my system

So I use Arch for my personal work. I never had a problem with stability. I've also started to be interested in NixOS, but I'm gonna just use it as an Server OS, I feel like it makes sense with the infrastructure as code implications.

openSuse. After my years of distro hopping ended over a decade ago I settled on openSuse Leap and never switched to something else again. It's reliable and gives me the least bullshit. And by now it's the one I have the most experience in.

//edit
Leap on my server and tumbleweed on my work laptop but Leap would be sufficient there, too.

I tried quite a few of distros and I keep on going back to Fedora. A lot of things come out of the box such as Flatpak, it won't pester you about the password when you just want to install a app and i barely find myself solving issues with command line.

My other two favorites are Mint and Pop, i can recommend these to beginners and I really just like a good out of the box experience, avoiding command line where possible. Are there others that tick these boxes?

Well I would have normally said Fedora but with the current RedHat issues I'm thinking of making a switch. but in my opinion Fedora was always rock stable and leading edge. currently looking at an alternative.

Go to? Probably Mint. Such a good distro. Unfortunately I recently joined camp KDE Plasma and no other desktop environment can even compare.
I'm on Fedora KDE now. Solid distro for now at least.
If I need to return to monkee: EndeavourOS

For the past six years it has been Kubuntu, but I think it's time to finally abort Canonical and their idiosyncrasies and choose Debian as a KDE base, especially now that Debian 12 includes non-free firmware by default.

Xubuntu - great ootb configuration, lightning fast on my old thinkpad without compromising on functionality

I am typically on Arch on all my machines since 2006. For a while I bootstrapped new machines using EndeavorOS, but usually stripped out their packages and returned to vanilla arch. Since I now prefer ZFS as root fs, I am back to installing from scratch, to get exactly the layout I want.

unless we're talking about my main machine, which runs gentoo, i'll always default to alpine. super solid base system and packages. super accessible when it comes to upstreaming packages. I only wish they had s6 as an option for init/service manager