My top 5 distros Sept 2019

[crosscourt]

These are based on my needs, hardware and experience, your mileage may vary.

1.Zorin OS 15
2.KDE Neon
3.Q4OS Centaurus 2.8 KDE
4.Mageia 7
5.Netrunner 19.08

Out of these five distros only Zorin handles my Dell Edock and external monitor with no intervention.

[tlmiller]

And as my usual, I'll post mine from a completely different perspective of what I want from an OS...

1. Debian (how original and exciting, I bet noone saw that coming as my #1!! )
2. KDE Neon
3. Arch w/ an installer
4. Void
5. Manjaro

Still running Fedora, but just getting tired of it. From the upgrade frequency to it's having bleeding edge software at one spot, and old and tired software somewhere else, I'm starting to just lose interest in running it.

[crosscourt]

Void and Manjaro, didnt realize you were running those two.

[tlmiller]

At the moment it's only on VM's (YAY 16 threaded CPU!!), not on real hardware. But I'm soon going to try one of them on the Samsung in place of Fedora (probably Void) and see how it goes on bare iron.

[crosscourt]

Use to use Fedora quite a bit but I grew tired of the things you mentioned. Manjaro wasnt bad but Im still not a fan of Arch.

[tlmiller]

I love Arch (although you probably already knew that). Manjaro I've always been significantly less fond of, as I've had issues in the past with it. At least my latest install (again, it's only in a VM so no hardware "oddities" to try to work around) has been absolutely flawlessly smooth, but for me I'm not sure if it truly deviates from Arch enough to bother using on real hardware.

[crosscourt]

I dont run distros in VM and either use the live media or install. In both cases I had issues with the most recent version of Manjaro, nothing major but enough to push me away. Most of my tech friends like Arch but arent overly fond of it. In my case being an intermediate user, as Im not as involved with tech or software as I was many years ago, I prefer more straightforward easy to use distros, so I can focus on just getting things done. If I were more in your shoes that perspective might be far different. I spend more time helping mainstream users and installing distros on charity systems. Im in a far different situation to yours. I spent most of my life in DOS/Windows/gamin and until this year was still very involved with it.
I also use much older hardware so some distros and DE's create issues particularly with my Edock/laptop arrangement presently.

We'll see what happens as Im now using Linux full-time for the first time and focused more on it for a variety of needs.

Zorin has been amazing(only drawback is, it uses 1gb of ram at GUI) as it supports all my systems properly, has no issues with the docks and immediately sets up the external monitor with me having to do nothing, even while installing and moving drives between systems. This is not the case with the other distros as they all force me to open the laptop and indicate Im using the external monitor, sometimes not working the first time.

[tlmiller]

I've been starting to use VM's a lot more now that I have CPU to spare. Wish I had 32 GB ram, as I'd love to be able to run VM's simultaneously. But with "only" 16, I can still run 1-2. Although with 2 running simultaneously, and no swap, I have to be very careful of how much I attempt to do on the host system, as performance when you run out of ram with no swap goes completely off a cliff!!

As someone who's been running linux for 20+ years, actually at this point I've used linux as my OS far longer than I've used Windows, I probably consider myself a moderate to advanced user. I don't like a lot of the gui helpers. I don't want things running in the background without my knowledge. I don't want services to be installed without my knowledge. So for someone who wants utter control of their system (and therefore ability to keep performance at an absolute top level if they need), Arch is a fantastic OS. And the repos (with AUR) are absolutely gargantuan, so I find that while Arch is a PITA to set up for various reasons, once it's up and running, it's a magnificent OS. If it didn't get new kernels it seems every 15 minutes EVEN ON LTS kernels, it would have a CHANCE of competing with Debian as my favorite. As is, it'll never compete because they just like to update kernels too often, and I get tired of having to reboot every time I boot to install the new kernel that was just released 20 minutes before I booted.

Void offers much the same feeling as Arch, but is far more "raw". Although I'm hoping it's starting to get a bit more polished at this point, as the rawness is what kept me from actually using it for any length of time on bare steel.

Manjaro, IMO, is a decent system, but in the end, it offers me no meaningful advantage over Arch. It installs far more than I want requiring me to remove those packages, and doesn't offer anything Arch doesn't. I think it's a good OS, it's nice that they delay the updates from Arch a bit to basically "soften" the bleeding edge woes that Arch users experience. But long term, I'll never love it as long as Arch is still around. Doesn't mean I don't occassionally recommend it to someone who wants MOST of the Arch experience, without the setup hassle.

[crosscourt]

Looks like Mageia 7 is out as it doesnt work with my hardware with the latest updates. The RPM distros in general lately have been a mixed bag.
Replaced it with Neptune OS 6 which is a very nice Debian 10 offering.

[tlmiller]

Yeah, right now I don't have any RPM distro's. They've just all been too many little irritants that add up and make it so I'd rather not use them. Or they just plain don't work for me.