Depends on the context.

Me - Yes. I use Debian 12. No intention any time to go back because of how much I love using Debian. May fire up a VM of Arch so I can run some specific AUR packages I am curious to try out, but we'll see. I am cautious to go on another distor hopping bender between Debian and Arch as they are my 2 favorite distros and I am easily led to do that.

Work - No and that is fine me. I have no control over that and I'm still productive with Windows/Microsoft products.

Family - I am the tech support person of the household. I prefer for people to use what they are comfortable with because that's less on me to maintain.

I've become very impressed with LM. I got 2 family members' laptop going again with that. Nice choice.

Thunderbird

I'm at the point whe recommending distros fir new comers its Debian, Arch, Fedora and Linux Mint.

Debian is my go to. Stable, I love the apt package manager. Desktop environment is a bit irrelevant with recommendations because you can easily install any desktop environment or window manager. You will figure out what environment you like along the way. Installation is simple, you can do minimal installs as well and it's what many big name distros are based on.

I really like Arch. Minimal, great package manager, AUR extends application availability even when you have flatpaks, snaps and app images and the repo. You can use the archinstall script these days so you don't have to worry about installing the old-fashioned Arch way. It will also teach you what to do when updates fail because it's a rolling release.

If none of those are appealing then I would advise Fedora. Great package manager, get newer packages if package versions are important for you and a solid distribution that is the upstream for Red Hat. It's the best of both worlds of Debian and Arch in my opinion.

The last one is Linux Mint. I've found myself avoid recommening forks. This is my exception. I can't say a lot because I haven't used it much. But I've installed it 2x to different family members who never used Linux before and use it and love it. I did it because they are forks and I can give support because I'm familiar with what it's based on and the high recommendation from the online community. It's great for beginners and veterans alike from what I can tell from the online community. Great team of developers.

I was installing Arch several years ago now and somehow deleted all of the partitions and then all of a sudden I didn't see any drives or anything on it so I closed it and powered down and assumed it was a paperweight. Years later i decided to see if I could get it running again and I was able to get it running again. I found out that hard shutdowns would have got everything up and going again to them point I could put an OS back on it. So I don't know which one was dumber, the installation mistake or me thinking the laptop became a paperweight. I lean towards the latter because I've had no problems with Arch since.

For me, the systems I've installed Mint on for people, haven't had any problems at this current time. While I have never had an issue using Fedora myself(never been interested enough in OpenSUSE to keep with it when I've tried it), I'll never recommend Fedora in similar cases where I've installed Mint. The machines were older and the users aren't Linux enthusiasts. They just want a working machine to do basic tasks without breaking their bank to get a new machine when their Windows OS reached EOL.

However I can't confirm or explain why the people you say that are doing this challenge are having problems. I don't know their hardware specs and I don't know them so I don't know what they know about Linux.

(Please note, to all Mint users, I'm not saying Mint is only for non-Linux enthusiasts. I love how Mint is good for the non-enthusiasts and enthusiasts alike).

Impressive that Gentoo was your first distro.

4-5 years ago. Started because my one machine won't get security updates from Microsoft and my main machine isn't eligible for the Windows 11 update.

Started on Ubuntu and then did some heavy distro hopping. I've ended up preferring only 2 distros; Debian and Arch. There's plenty of others that I like but those are my top 2.

Mint is what I have used to introduce people to Linux and so far only good responses. I also recommend Debian and Debian derivatives.

Just ran out of my local brews, Troegs Field Study IPA, so going to be cracking open some Coors Banquet soon. But I don't think you will. I use Debian 12 with AwesomeWM and love it.

I use awesome. Right now I use pretty standard key bindings. I have it looking more like i3, due to the awful wibar placement and font size. I've thought about making special key bindings for constantly used programs however I'm pretty content with Super-P and type the program I want. The most customized I have the awesome config file is, the only available layout is set to spiral and dwindle.

Soon I'd like to implement glyphs and once I figure that out I'll be more apt to make keyboard shortcuts. I also would like to see if I can round up the awful wibar.

Debian with the Awesome WM. I'm biased because that's what I use.

CrunchBang++, BunsenLabs, Bodhi, Antix and Peppermint.

I'll respond when I'm done doing it. I plan on firing up my 15+ year laptop and install it the Arch way for the hell of it.

Generally speaking, I have nothing to really argue against that..but I can only recommend based on how I have learned Linux. I have found myself only enjoying the base distros and not forks because no matter all the time I wasted distro hopping, I felt like I was using the same thing over and over again beyond the package manager or installer.

One thing I would add is, when I used Arch, I avoided the Arch forums...specifically because of what you mentioned. In one way, one should expect that of the Arch forums. If you choose to use a distro that forces you to build the system yourself, you should expect to fix your problems yourself. So the forums I found useless and never posted there. The fact there is even an Arch forum that offers supports, beyond the wiki, I find funny. I would just use the wiki and search engines.

I've never used PopOS. I'm not into forks and it is based on Ubuntu. This isn't to say I think it's bad. I just don't recommend forks. If you want to try PopOS, go for it.

With the options you gave, Fedora. Not really into the AUR. I don't think it is bad, just not for me.

Xterm

So some people switched to phone only after Windows 8 security stopped...

Jokes aside, it's cool to see it move up no matter how small the move is.

Forgot to update...so I was able to get it install with the archinstall script with no issue. Installing it the Arch way, by using the docs, went super well until I went to install the boot loader. I saw no errors when going by all the steps prior to the boot loader install so I'm guessing I was installing grub incorrectly, or maybe something I'm not aware of. I'll try again soon and respond with the fix, when I get it installed that is, in case you run into the same issue.

Debian and Arch, for me, tie as my favorite and honestly can't say I would want to change anything as I need to use the technology more before I can critique it like that.