| Off the top of my head... Some people want to build everything from source. Some people want a preconfigured Gnome enviornment. Some people want a preconfigured KDE environment. Some people want a distro with the latest version of packages. Some people want a distro that is conservative about upgrading packages. Some people are running in VMs and don't need all that extra crap. Some people want a version that pedantically sticks to the spirit of the GPL. Some people want a version that is maximally convinient GPL be damned. I'm sure there's more reasons. |
I use Arch (formerly Gentoo) on my work and home PCs/laptops because I like rolling releases with a bleeding edge. I generally run Ubuntu LTS minimal installs for servers because they are tiny and stable and guarantee to be upgradeable to the next LTS release. I run Home Assistant IoT wranglers on Debian because that's what HA insists on for "Supervised".
My wife uses Arch because I look after it and she doesn't care. It simply has to just work and it has for years now without skipping a beat.
Upgrading hardware for laptops and PCs means dumping the filesystems to files on a server or whatever and blatting them onto the new device. If there is physical space, put the old HD/SSD/whatevs into the new box and use a live CD like system rescue or Clonezilla. All the drivers are built in out of the box. These days most things simply work with minimal fiddling. I can't remember the last time I fiddled with xorg.conf. OK I disabled the touchscreen on this laptop when I cracked it and that involved fiddling with xorg. I remember setting modelines by hand in XFree86 ...