Historically, Sun started with what was at the time revolutionary workstations.
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Sun was a great technology company. They just didnāt know how to run a business. We had to pester them for months to get someone to actually take our $XXX,XXX annual maintenance paymentsā¦
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They were probably too busy at Pixar?
In the mid -2000s my manager had, IIRC, a $270k-odd annual maintenance invoice / payment and spent more than three months trying to find someone at Sun to take it. Unbelievableā¦
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I have at least a couple of items to chime in on, but Iām not trying to convince or unconvince anyone about anything. To me, thatās the beauty of FOSS: use what you like for the reasons you like it, and allow others the courtesy of doing the same.
So, I have been a happy Arch Linux user since at least 2014. Some people say it is difficult to maintain and it is āunreliableā, but I have had no trouble in either of those areas. I run the nVidia proprietary driver on an RTX 2060 card with 6 GB and 1,920 CUDA processors. OpenCL works well for me.
I managed and administered UNIX server hosts professionally for a couple of decades. Sun SPARC was my favorite of the ones I worked with (which also included HP, AT&T, and IBM, and probably others). I also used a Sun workstation on my desk and hated it when they tried to force me to use X emulation software on Windows PCs. My boss stood up for me and I kept my Sun box.
Both of my adult sons are steadfast Mac users. There is a lot of UNIX at the heart of MacOS, too.
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Me too, Iāve been using Arch for a similar amount of time (on laptops, desktops and raspberry pis) and I could count on one hand the issues Iāve had to resolve with my Linux-fu. Itās been rock solid for me.
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I can see the pull of tinkering with Linux, but there are so many things to tinker with and so little time, so I strive to minimize work for Linux machines that maintain (between 10ā15, including servers, desktops, laptops, and cloud instances). I have been sticking with Debian and derivatives since 1999, trying out other options occasionally but always coming back to Debian.
Once you install them, it is my experience that most mainstream Linux distros (incl Arch, Debian, Fedora, & derivatives) work just fine. From then it is all up to personal preferences and what one is familiar with.
My only gripe with Linux at the moment is that ext4 is getting long in the tooth, and btrfs is still not production-ready without caveats. It would be great to have a filesystem that does native compression, block-level error checking, snapshots, and is not ZFS.
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Fear not, bcachefs is in kernel 6.7
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I am keeping an eye on bcachefs, but note that inclusion in the kernel does not imply stability (especially for related tooling). Btrfs has been in the kernel for a decade now.
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Iāve used btrfs for years. Almost no troubles, and none for a long time.
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I worked for an electric utility and we had two old AIX machines. One replaced the other but Iām drawing a blank on the actual machine model names (getting old sucks). The first was a floor-sized roll-around server that booted from tape and the second was a more desktop-type form factor which ran SMIT, IIRC.
They both ran the same power plant management software (subsequent versions). Both were mostly vendor-supported, at least until the users got tired of paying maintenance, then guess who āgotā to work on themā¦ Fortunately they rarely broke and became unpatchable due to their age, so unless hardware failed we just left them alone. That was all-too-typical of deeply-embedded niche software / hardware systems (often SCADA) in those days.
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The first time I tried btrfs, determining free space on a volume was wonky. I re-installed on ext4, but soon therafter (probably the next fedora release) I tried again, and havenāt had a problem for years (knocking on wood).
Slowaris was a nice Unix. I really didnāt care for AIX, even though Power hardware was quite good. But all this nostalgia reminds me of re-purposing an old DEC ALPHA that had been a 64-bit Windows Oracle server (/shudder) and putting linux on it for my development teamsā use. Good times.
My distro-hopping days were long before Arch existed, but even Gentoo, LFS, and SourceMage just werenāt enough smaller, faster, or more configurable than Debian to make any difference to me. So, Iāve never tried Arch. NixOS is on the wishlist if I ever get the urge to distro-hop again. Iāve use Nix on Silverblue, and itās interesting.
I use Fedora on desktops now, mostly just due to years of RHEL, and now Amazon Linux at work. Plus it makes it easier to support devs and devops folks who are running Fedora and are less linux savvy.
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Iāve been using NixOS since 2017 and all I can say is āYESā
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It suddenly occurred to me (while wrestling with a ācronā command) that I do use Raspian a fair bitā¦ I have a couple of projects running on Piās.
So I can say that Iām a Raspian user. 
P.S. I did get the cronjob to work eventually.
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How do you know someone uses Arch?
Donāt bother - he will tell you!
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Yeah nobody wants to admit to using Ubuntu 
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Long term (K)Ubuntu user here. Not sure I will stick for long if they start putting everything in snap packages, though.
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Man, itās getting annoying, isnāt it? Especially when they decided to move the snaps to /snap. Gotta love the constant cleanups of the root partition.
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Yep, I went back to Debian mostly because of the snapfestation.
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Many years ago i āfiddled aroundā and recompiled real-time kernels as i was mainly doing and developing real-time audio processing. These days are gone for long.
Since then i strictly follow this mantra: Install once - on the new computer ~3.5yrs ago - then do updates every couple of days and after a new release - upgrade. Never had a significant problem for years with the system or nvidia stuff and never had to dig into distro/linux internals. I would concider that a complete waste of time. Thatās why using fedoara.
As i do daily dev-work on darktable i have to trust for a reliable system for recompiling darktable master and testing developing PRās. Insignificant problems is had in > 3yrs
- Once a buggy nvidia driver for a week - only to be noticed while working on OpenCL kernels
- Three times i had problems with new gcc version, usually fixed within a day.
Message short: i donāt give a shit what distro i use as long itās stable and maintained
Unfortunately - we donāt have statistics about darktable user problems related to operating system or distribution. Some systems seem to invite people into trouble (i would think Arch derivates and windows would be top-of-the-list
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