For my desktop at home I love my Xandros desktop. for my office work, RHEL desktop, as it is company standard. But If I had my choice, I would have either had Novell Desktop or Mandriva 2007.1.

I do not like distros which give too many packages and installs too many unwanted and unused applications. I want to be in control of the apps that goes in on my desktop/server (yup, i am a control freak) I have custom kickstart on my servers.

-GGR

Because it's the most UNIX-like Linux distribution.
No dependency handling by pkgtool, which is wonderful.
Compiling all third-party software is a great way
to optimize the functionality of the applications and to have
a non-bloated system. A full installation gives you all the development
tools you could ever dream of. The fact that it's shipped with vanilla
kernel is another thing that I really love.
If you are a CLI power user, or a sysadmin, this is the distribution to run.
Not a coincidence it's the oldest surviving Linux distribution.
Patrik is doing a superb job!

You better make this poll:

What Linux distro are you using? and what for?

I started on Slackware 1996, and still using it, for my servers.

I use Mandrake for my desktop.

I recommend SuSe for your school district (Novell shop)

I push for RedHat for your corporate environment (have the corporate ideology)

I hold respect for YDL & MK Linux for Mac's, the old Mac's.

I praise apt get family (Ubunto, Debian, etc) for cool desktop offerings.

I like Pink Tie for Sparc hardware(its a Redhat port).

I greet Linspire for the most daring marketing action, by having Wal-Mart sell Linux loaded PC's.

But most important:

I stand attention with salute for embedded Linux, king of the new gadgets, conductor of MP3& DVD players, ruler of the cellphones world, runner of every small router and cable modem in almost every house hold, and the future system of almost any small piece of electronics in the next century.

Someday, I'll have a Dick Tracey's watch, with a penguin logo.

That day is sooner than we think.

I like RedHat,because I just like it!
Do you like a red hat?
Come on!Boys and Grils!
Join Us,RedHat(红帽子)!

There's something about Ian's partner that you seem to have inside knowledge of. Pun not intended.

I'm not voting because:

a) It's a horses for courses
and
b) I can't make up mind ;-)

What does surprise me that the "shiny-shiny" kid on the block, which is doing very well on HPD on distrowatch, PCLinuxOS isn't an option, nor has it been mentioned.

Gentoo would be my choice of Linux. My perception is Linux is meant for learning and Redhat to some extent suppresses that. Slackware is good too along with Debian but Gentoo is almost like LFS

Also Gentoo gives me a solid O/s with loads of customization and almost all sorts of tuning parameters which other distros do not allow me to without "re"compilation (or maybe am not aware of it). Redhat is good to start with and due to their paid support its good for production servers too but i believe if someone wants to really learn linux he should try LFS

~Sage