I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones...
And it just seems to me like there's more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they'll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.
So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?
I use Linux since 1999 and I'm with you, I don't like niche distros. I like them to be well supported with many devs in them, and a structure around them. My days of tinkering died already in 2002 (I'm looking at you Gentoo and sia). Since then, I want things to work the way I expect them. That's why I now use Debian or Mint.
Same. I started off on Gentoo, jumped to Puppy, jumped to Slack, jumped to Fedora, jumped to Arch, jumped to Nix, jumped to Guix, jumped back to Arch, and now I'm thinking Debian is the only true stable upstream linux needs.
Plus I'm sick of tweaking my configs for the N'th time to work on the M'th system. To quote a random side-character in American Dad: "I have painted my children for the last time."
(I will at some point start playing with BSD's though, I just know it. And Haiku too once they have decent laptop support.)