Great choice! I would have to agree with you that among binary distributions, Arch has to be the fastest one out there because you configure exactly what you want. Based originally on Slackware and spun off from there, with the creation of pacman and a number of other tools, Arch is a very fast bleeding edge binary distribution. I have it in my collection.

For every day use, though, while I appreciate bleeding edge and I do experiment with many of them, I have found sidux, a cutting edge, Debian Sid based binary distribution, to be the ground that suits my needs best. I call it Debian Sid on steroids and mood stabilizers. The sidux team has come up with ways to tame Debian Sid so that it consistently works, yet have software that is about as up to date as anything you can get other than nightly builds of the code that you are interested in.

There are numerous great distributions out there, and I would not for a second try to criticize anyone else's choices. So many of them are excellent and they are all, of course, based on great free and open software (though some versions, particularly commercial versions, have a lot of non free software in order to meet their own needs and expectations, and that is fine, too, because it represents another choice).

So for me, sidux gets the nod!

I use Debian. Reason why? In the late 90's, I asked some savvy linux users which one I should get for my laptop, and they told me Debian, because it was the most difficult to install, and if I could install it, I'd impress the heck out of rest of the geeks who couldn't

..hey, that's what they said...

..so that's the linux I use in my laptops...

I used RedHat 9 from the beginning, and now using Fedora Core 5. Still don't want to change to another distro.

difficult to say. i am not really a linux guy, but have to use it from time to time. started with SuSE & RH on our servers, and on my desktop i used Debian and Gentoo, right now i am using Ubuntu cause everything works without much touching. to be honest, the nice things on linux are the GNU environments, so what i am really waiting for is a good, stable Nexenta OS version...

regards PRESSY

No offence but FreeBSD is NOT a Linux distro. It's an OS altogether. There's FreeBSD just like there's GNU/Linux or there's Solaris...

This being said my favourite distro for a desktop would be Ubuntu.
For a server i'd go for Debian.

I prefer SuSe. Mainly because that's what we run here and that's what I know the best...

A valid point. I removed the option...no one had voted for it anyway. And while I was editing the poll, I went ahead and changed the names of Lindows and Mandrake to their current names.