efaardvark

Right now I'm running Ubuntu 17.10 on my main desktop system and an older SuSE on my LAN gateway/firewall.  I've also got a Synology NAS that's running whatever their version of linux is.  In the distant past I also used RedHat. 

I don't really have a favorite distro.  I pretty much use whichever one does what I need when I set up a new system.  Distrowatch.org is my friend.    SuSE is handy because they have everything, including proprietary stuff (when necessary).  Ubuntu I've tried only recently and I can't really recommend it at the moment.  They're a bit behind on their kernel updates and their desktop/gui situation is a bit disorganized as they transition away from their custom "unity" interface and back to Gnome (or KDE).  Should be better in a year or so though, and I'm still on 17.10 when 18.04 is current so maybe I might upgrade to 18.04 LTS at some point in the near future.  If that isn't what I need then go to something like Arch or Manjaro.

Not that Ubuntu is causing me any problems at the moment.  It is fine for day-to-day stuff.. youtube, discord (even my new headset), spotify, etc.  I've even got a few games like Kerbal Space Program that push the CPU and GPU pretty hard and that work fine.  I have an old FX-8370 processor and a recent-ish RX480 GPU in there now that are well supported hardware-wise. 

I'd like to upgrade to Ryzen (or even Threadripper) and a better GPU over the next year however and that's going to take a newer kernel.  My Ubuntu 17.10 is still using linux kernel v4.13 from a year ago, before the new AMD CPUs came out.  Ubuntu 18.04 is based on linux 4.15 while Manjaro is on the latest-and-greatest 4.17.  The difference means things like good Vulkan, mesa, and Vega (3d) support for newer games, working HDMI sound on newer GFX cards (needed for most VR setups), and painless virtualization and optimizations for the new CPUs.