Linux

This is an aberration. You must choose one and never deviate.

Seriously though I think it's pretty normal. When I install Linux i usually pick whatever distro at the time and end up using a couple of different ones. I have arch on my desktop and Pop OS on my laptop at the moment.

Is it weird that you prefer different tools for different jobs?

Nope.

No, though it is weird that you feel like you should ask such nonsensical questions in public forums.

No in fact that’s a violation of the GPLv69 and Richard Stallman is going to come to your house and format your hard drive

Using the tool that best fits the use case is not weird. It's common sense.

Yes. It's illegal actually. A Microsoft team has been dispatched and is en route to your place right now to install Win 11 S on all of your devices.

It would be weirder to like Linux and Windows, but hey someone had to write samba 😹

Is it weird

No. You're fine.

I use both myself, Fedora for desktop work and Debian for server

I keep going back and forth between Xubuntu Minimal and Fedora. Im just tooling around on a $38 Lenovo Chromebook, which has only 16GB of flash storage (soldered of course). Fedora has the smaller footprint, and runs pretty smooth. Xubuntu Minimal is, well, minimal so it is pretty snappy. Xfce is where it’s at for me.

Sometimes having so much choice can feel like a hindrance when it comes to trying to find a district that checks all of our boxes.

I like em all to match usually. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on the desktop/laptop, Leap on my home server.

Though I didn't run Arch on my server when I did on my personal computers

Those are both good distros for those purposes. I'm not a fan of Debian as a desktop distro but it's awesome as a headless server, and Fedora moves too fast for my tastes as a server distro but that's fine in a desktop.

So good choice.

I think it's pretty normal. For me, I switch back and forth between NixOS and Arch because neither of them provides me with exactly what I'm looking for i.e a distro that has all the packages I use within its repos (I hate compiling) and is static release (I often forget to update), but is not immutable (sometimes I need special programs for university that can only be obtained via compiling from source on a non-immutable distro). Arch and NixOS both have all the packages I need (only ones that do afaik), and one of them pffers static release but is immutable, while the other is rolling release but is not immutable. Currently I'm on Arch, but when (if) it breaks, I'll just switch to NixOS instead of fixing it, and use distrobox or something similar for any packages that need to be compiled.

I think that is completely normal. I run Arch on my main desktop, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop and Debian on any and all servers I host. And I think they all work wonderfully. Even outside of these distros, I can still see the use case for many other distros. I think many popular distros each have a specific goal in mind and they execute it well.

I do the same. Fedora on my laptop because I want a balance of stability and having the newest features. Servers run Debian, because I don't have time to fix and update things.

I use Debian on my servers, Arch on my laptop and desktop. Different tools for different jobs. I tried Debian on my laptop a few years ago but it wasn't a good fit for me - my hardware was too new for the stable kernel, and the Wayland/wlroots stuff was too far behind. As a server though, especially since I'm mostly running Podman containers, stable and slow-updating is great! I use unattended-upgrades and haven't had a problem yet.

I haven't spent much time with Fedora but I'd probably like it as a desktop OS - fairly fast updates, and sticks pretty close to upstream without a ton of custom theming for example. I would miss the AUR, but Flatpak covers a lot of what I need, and Distrobox could handle anything else.

I just stick with one because I'm boring. I've used it for a long time, it works, I haven't really changed anything in years. I think it's pretty cool to talk with people who are polydistroamorous though.

Sounds like you're a QubesOS user, which ships with both

If you are weird so am I. Fedora desktop + 3 Debian headless boxes. Though I may nix everything some day.

Edit: Why do I catch more stray downvotes on Lemmy than I ever did Reddit? I swear there must be downvote bots out there.

I'm using Fedora GNOME for my pcie passthrough desktop vm and Debian Bookworm for my hypervisor and virtual servers.
When Bookworm ages I'm sure I'll mix in other distros for vm servers to try out stuff that isn't available in Debian Stable yet.
I'm also curious to set up a virtual NixOS and a virtual Fedora Silverblue/Atomic just to check them out.

I also don't order the same pizza everytime.

I'm an arch Linux user and I like most of the distros, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, RockyOS... I try different distros too, my problem is that I will always return to Arch Linux and a simple i3wm environment... but I like GNOME, KDE and the awesome Wayland. It's just I like what I am used to and goes faster, and I can use the same tools as always. xdotool for example, the alternative for Wayland is ydotool which is a daemon running as root to emulate a device and I dislike the idea of doing that, root? systemctl daemon? Hmm...

But I could be totally good with fedora, at the end I just want the i3wm environment and the wonderful bash or zsh terminal (like alacritty) to interact with Linux. Best OS than Apple and Windows. Funny how Apple interface sucks so much, they lack from smart UI, Windows 11 forces you to log in, their UI is messed up, good thing is their desktop is smart enough to grid windows, and their terminals sucks, PowerShell has good things, but it's not the same... c:\an\\'t\find\Paths/ and I don't really see the good on Object-oriented on terminal and stuff like apple being able to render high quality image on your terminal so you can see on a normal prompt a 8k image on the same terminal app... wtf, and they are even closed and people/companies pays for it.

Why should it be? I drive Arch on my desktop and Debian 12 Bookworm on my laptop, they are very different distributions but both serve me very well.

I use arch for all of that I'm running vms and host ssh servers also run containers & it never broken for me and to be honest your situation is weird 3 distro for one job.

I'll go against the grain a little bit and say it's a little weird. There's nothing wrong with liking multiple distros, but a lot of people either stick with RPM-based (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, OpenSUSE, Mageia) or Debian-based (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, Elementary). Then you have weirdos that like Gentoo, where nearly every package you install has to be compiled on the system. Or Arch, where the "installer" throws you in a terminal, and damn near everything has to be done manually to get your system up and running. And updates are "rolling release", and if you try to update just one package without updating the rest of your system things can easily break.

I am mostly a fan of Debian-based distros myself. But I'll use CentOS on a VM if I'm trying to self-host anything that recommends it.

Use whatever you want for personal. But I would suggest trying to use containers for hosting if you haven't already. It really blows the idea of needing a stable OS out of the water since you can just declare everything you want in a config file and tear down and spin up with the app you need ready in less than a minute.

You can use Ubuntu still of course in a container. But things get really interesting when you use smaller attack surface distros like Alpine, BusyBox, or even a distroless container.