Nowadays it's mostly inertia.

But I think it all began with disliking systemd and at the same time being obsessed with ricing and minimalism. Tiling window managers, simple terminals, LuaKit as a web browser (!), stuff like that.

Back then I was young and had very strong opinions, and also had the time to be switching OS whenever I wanted, and apparently I didn't mind setting up stuff again and again (ugh). My first choice was actually Artix Linux, but it broke at some point. I was already using Alpine Linux and FreeBSD in VPSs (Linode and Digital Ocean respectively), and they were still working fine so they seemed stable enough, so I started experimenting with installing FreeBSD locally and just setting up i3wm on it (also Poudriere got me curious about compiling packages by myself with only the flags I needed). Then when I got a laptop I went with Alpine Linux there, it was already a minimal distro that I was familiar with, so if I could get i3wm working there it should be good enough.

And I have survived with them so far with no reason to change, so it's probably just coincidence that I was using Alpine Linux (and FreeBSD) when I decided to "settle down".

But like I said, today it's mostly inertia, just a personal preference thing like buying Ketchup from a specific brand whenever possible because I'm most used to how this one tastes but no big deal if it's not available. It hasn't given me any surprises or any annoyances big enough for me to seriously consider switching.

I do have Linux Mint on a third[1] computer tho, mostly for Steam, but ready to be quickly repurposed in case of any surprises.

I still have some leftover dislike of systemd and its scope creep, but it's not a religious dislike like back then; today it's similar to a "why does this website have 20MB of JavaScript just to show text and why does it ask for my location"-kind of dislike, but back then was like "the GNU Project declaring war against any software that doesn't use specifically a GNU license even if that software has an OSI-approved license"-kind of dislike. Recently when I used Hetzner for some stuff and found out they don't have Alpine Linux or FreeBSD as (easy) choices, I was like "oh well, Fedora it is".

So yeah, there you have it.

[1]: Why a third computer? Well, you can thank two spicy pillow incidents for that. Don't buy Medion laptops.