I have always been interested in computers, and would find myself hanging out with the Computer Science students instead of the Aviation Management or Business Management students I was a part of. At home and at work I have been largely self-teaching myself using computers starting with Excel and Access with VBA through ASP and SQL at work. Thankfully my current employer values education, and so I have been taking classes and not only learning the technology, but un-learning what I have been doing wrong over the years. At home, though, I have been teaching myself Linux, system administration, networking and the overall method of migrating our system from Windows to Linux. I am involved in the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS.org) I have the opportunity to take what I've learned the hard way and hopefully help others.. I have been enjoying Open Source for a while now, and I am hoping to get a better understanding of the entire model and application.
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I picked Ubuntu for the family desktop because I wanted something easy to set up, easy to maintain and the breadth of applications. I needed something that I could set up and leave alone.
I tried Ubuntu on my laptop for consistency but it won't play anymore on it (9-10 yr old IBM, pre-Lenovo, Thinkpad T40) because of the PAE component of the kernel so I moved to between Fedora and openSUSE.
OpenSUSE has interested me a few times because the OBS and I figured if I am setting up a server it shouldn't hurt to be familiar with the desktop aspect too.
Fedora has become my fall-back system (if all else fails...) because largely "it just works" on my laptop out-of-the-box. While Fedora works wonderfully technically, it takes a bit more tweaking to get it "just right".
Once I get my HDMI to VGA adapter, then I'll start messing around with the Raspberry Pi I got for Christmas. I plan on starting out with Raspian because that is the more common distro an I am going to be just starting to learn. If I knew Fedora better then Pidora would be a logical choice, so I won't discount it as a future endeavor.
I prefer sticking with more mainstream distributions because while I can tinker to make the system the way I like it, I too often get distracted with a new "shiny" version or distribution and have to start tweaking all over again! :)
Someday I'll probably have an Android device to go along with my Chromebook (Cr48).
I have to go with the one that has lasted the longest in the family which is Ubuntu on the family desktop.
Otherwise, I keep switching up on my personal laptop and other computers. I've had Ubuntu on it until 12.04 because it is one of the unlucky ones that the PAE enabled Ubuntu kernel does not run on it (not that it was really slow anyway). Pretty much I go between Fedora and openSUSE.
My daughter, who isn't very interested in computers, tells me she <strong>prefers</strong> Linux!
The other kids prefer Linux and have been using it since they started using the computer. The only reason Windows is used is for a game that we haven't gotten to work under Wine (it's supposed to but installation is tricky and I haven't succeeded yet).
Now, if it were multiple choice I would pick (not in any particular order):
> Fedora
> openSUSE
> Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Xubuntu
> Raspian or Pidora (just got a Raspberry Pi over the holidays)