What is your Linux of Choice? Why?

I've been using Debian-based distros exclusively for a couple years now. I started out with RedHat 4.1 (a long time ago) and continued up to RedHat 9...also used Mandrake 6 through 10 quite a bit. I don't know how I suffered through RPM hell for so long. A lot of traditionally RPM-based distros are supposedly getting way better at dependency management and actually allow you to use apt and install debs (I've heard Mandriva has resolved the dependency hell). For servers, I prefer Debian stable. For my desktop, I am currently using SimplyMEPIS 3.4.3, which is Debian based. There are a lot of good Debian based desktop distos out there, and most if not all are preconfigured to use the Debian repositories in apt's sources.list, in addition to the distro's repositories. I generally consider pure Debian a base distro these days, except for stable (sarge) server installations. I've messed around creating desktops from pure Debian, but it is all work...the derived distros definitely have more polish, install faster, and include more bleeding edge stuff from Debian tesing and/or unstable, and still have all the benefits of Debian. Examples that I have used are SimplyMEPIS, Knoppix, Kanotix, Ubuntu, Kubuntu. There is a lot of popularity with Ubuntu right now, but I can't stand Gnome and prefer KDE or a small footprint window manager like Ice or XFCE. Kanotix is based on Knoppix, with a backwards trend more towards pure Debian. I have a few more that I am checking out, and most work as Live CD's so there is no commitment factor. A really cool one is Damn Small Linux (a.k.a. DSL). The entire distro is only 50 megs and fits on a business card CD. It loads a complete desktop, and it screams on an old Pentium I 233 w/32 meg RAM IBM ThinkPad that I have. Of course, it is Debian-based. So far, for my desktop, I am sticking with MEPIS, with Kanotix coming in a close second.

Check out DistroWatch. This ia a great place to see what's going on out there, and it includes technical summaries and reviews of all distros, in addition to download statistics and ratings.

As far as making a living goes, you cannot go wrong knowing RedHat. It is the de facto commercial distro. I've had customers insist on using commercial RedHat ES...non-negotiable. Suse is also good to be familiar with for commercial purposes, as are the BSD variants. Only so much time in a day, though...it takes years.

I disagree that one should get to know one distro and stick to it. Sure, you will have your preferred one for your own workstation, but in the real world one needs to know all *nix flavors. I recently installed Solaris 10 and I was lost like a babe in the woods...definitely way more primitive from a usability standpoint, though their kernel is probably the most advanced out there for a server. You never what the next job is going to bring. You really need to be comfortable with deb, rpm and tar.gz's to be a good admin and/or developer. Additionally, the bash shell is not the default on most Unix systems...this can definitely throw you off if you are used to bash exclusively.

Peace.