Ah, "serious work". That well-known absolute thing that is the same for everyone.

Void is a small project, but absolutely rock solid. It's BSD inspired and systemd free. I like it a lot.

I can also vouch for Void - I've used it on my primary laptop for about 4 years. It's a solid distro, with a great community. Void is very configurable, and it's easy to contribute to the project.

It's also unlike a number of 'systemd free' distros (many of which are essentially "Distro X, except without systemd") because its non-use of systemd is not out of some hate for systemd, but because the developers decided after using systemd (Void adopted systemd for a time really early on) that it conflicted with other goals of the project (like offering a musl libc flavour alongside a glibc flavour).

Here's the thing. I would run: Ubuntu, Debian, Centos or Red Hat on my laptop, desktop and also on any server that I run.

I wouldn't run any small distro in AWS.

Have to agree here. I get a lot of benefits professionally from running Linux personally. I've been a full time desktop linux user over 10 years, and I'm often considered the "linux wizard" because I'm known for SSHing into servers and fixing obscure errors that others have looked at for hours with no success. My secret, is that I've run into most of the common problems (filesystem permission issues, including ACLs, selinux, low memory/OOM, conflicting dependency versions, etc) before and already mostly know how to fix them. The time I did on Arch was particularly helpful here. It was a hard first week or so but I learned more about linux during that two weeks than any other time.

Anyway the reasons I say that: These days I only run distros locally that I would run in production. I get intimately familiar with the intricacies of the distro that way and managing the servers comes natural to me because of that.

Slackware is still here looking at you guys

Slackware is the one Linux I keep coming back to after trying out something else. As always, it just works (and no dependency checking in its package managers is a blessing compared to dealing with some issues in Ubuntu or Debian; for others there's always pkgsrc, by the grace of NetBSD).

I know some developers use Gentoo with OpenRC for their daily work machines.

Devuan is a fork of Debian and it's alive and well.

Alpine and AntiX, I use them in VMs because they are lightweight, so far no issues.

What kind of apps do you run? A variety of languages/platforms?

Some stuff runs great in Alpine. Other stuff is subtlety but catastrophically broken in Alpine (such as database servers/clients and others that depend highly on locale for determining encoding).

Agreed. I thought Alpine was superb until I ran into an issue mounting NFS shares that seem to be mountable just fine on every other Linux machine I've got lying around. No idea what's wrong with Alpine's NFS.

> What kind of apps do you run? A variety of languages/platforms?

Mainly Python, some issues with Musl, but nothing too bad. Anyway, these days I tend to mainly use AntiX.

Gentoo, maybe?