it all depends on what you plan to use it for
 
for hacking and tweaking
 
Gentoo
Debian
arch
crux
 
 
For ease of use and beginner
 
Suse
Mandrake
 
 
For ease of use and ability to tweak
 
Fedora Core
Ubuntu
 
right now im personally using fedora core 3 and debian sarge but it all depends what fields your looking for

Gentoo, then Debian and some Debian-based distros. I use SuSE in testing because once user here in particular is used to it. In addition, I use OS X 10.3 (yeah, BSD-based but close enough) for testing.
 
Right now I am trying to get alternate OSs to integrate with our Active Directory environment, and possibly setting up alternate Kerberos realms to test trusts with. This has led me to play with a lot of distros lately.

Evening pr-man
 
On our boxes I've currently set up Debian, Mandrake and Gentoo mainly. As of today a FC3-box has joined the club and my personal machines are powered by Yoper at the moment.
 
The Debian-boxes are all servers and as far as it goes for hardcore-server stuff (apache 1.3.xx, postgres etc), I would not install any other distro - Debian's just too rock solid.
 
As for the workstations: The mainstream crates (office tasks) are fine off with MDK10, whereas most of the developer-stations dual boot either Gentoo or MDK. The latter ones because MDK blends nicely with VMWare 4 and provides a quite convenient platform for all things that deal with development in general. Gentoo's a sweet distro too, but 3 stage-1 setups per year is just about as much as I'm willing to invest time wise
 
Fedora 3 is now installed too on some boxes, and from what I can see, it's quite a gas. Need to peek into it more thoroughly though.
 
I, personally, have gone from MDK to Yoper now, as I'm doing a lot of 3d-programming/-animating and juggling huge image-files. And for these tasks Yoper provides a much faster platform without the tedious task of setting up a Gentoo-system. Apart from some minor flaws (see also "Menu transparency" Yoper really gets things going. GIMP was up and running via Synaptic in a few minutes and Blender skyrockets as Yoper comes with the proprietary nVidia-drivers right out of the box.
 
So ... I concurr with SoulNothing: Plenty of distros for plenty of uses. And - isn't that a fine thing to have?
 
have a nice day

SuSE 9.1 Personal. Very polished for a noob-boob like me (heh heh).

It's a really hard question, since I find many things I like in several distros. I run Fedora at our radio station. It seems to be friendly to our employees. We run Fedora Core two on two machines and Core one on another. At home, I have on my hard drive, in this order...
 
Fedora Core 2
Mandrake 7.2
Suse 9.1 Pro
Mandrake 9.1
 
Mandrake 7.2 is really just a hobby distro like Red Hat 6.2 which I have on another older machine. It fascinates me to see how Linux distros looked and felt years ago!
 
Right now, I'm trying to get Mandrake 7.2 to recognize an old 3com pci modem. You can learn a lot from an older version! The newer distros have become so easy they're almost no fun anymore!
 
I hope to also install either Mepis or Ubuntu to my hard drive. My wife uses Mepis RC4, which seems a very good choice for laptops.
 
I'm not smart enough to figure out Gentoo, so I don't know about it.
 
Of the Live CD distros, I like Morphix, Mepis, Kanotix, Damn Small and Ubuntu. All are Debian based!
 
Of the "Big" distros, SuSE seems to do almost everyting better than the others I've tried. It seems to offer more choices and flexibility.
 
If I was sent to a desert island for three years and could only take one distro, it would be SuSE 9.1 Pro.

I'm going to throw my vote in for Gentoo. Package managment with portage is great, and it was a great learning tool during it's long install.
 
Arch is also good, but I havn't seen a reason to replace my Gentoo system.
 
I agree that Suse 9.1 is a good, comfortable starting place for new users.
 
Blackpage, just out of curiousity, what had you doing 3 stage 1 installs a year?

I'm going to throw my vote in for Gentoo. Package managment with portage is great, and it was a great learning tool during it's long install.
 
Arch is also good, but I havn't seen a reason to replace my Gentoo system.
 
I agree that Suse 9.1 is a good, comfortable starting place for new users.
 
Blackpage, just out of curiousity, what had you doing 3 stage 1 installs a year?

Best distro for limited resource system, such as old Pentium 1 systems and lappys = Vector Linux and Libranet
 
Easy hardware recognition package management and full featured interface = Mandrake 10.1
 
Rock solid and good hands on learning experience with good package management = Debian Sarge
 
Easiest hands free distro that runs out-of-the-box = Linspire 4.5
 
Best Linux guru distro = Fedora Core 3
 
Best user friendly interface and system management Suse 9.1 Pro
 
Best low resource usage and for speed = Puppy Linux
 
Most feature packed and friendly cd live distro = Mepis

@taeuler
 
Blackpage, just out of curiousity, what had you doing 3 stage 1 installs a year?
 
The answer is quite simple: 8 servers and 18 workstations, and my super-geeky attitude to always furnish these "darlings" with the very latest and (if possible) the fastest and/or most stable OS )
 
It all started with one old P3/400, and out of curiosity I made a stage-1 install that took around 3-4 days (including KDE, KDevelop and what not else). The performance-result was just amazing (for P3/400), and that lured me into the idea of setting up more Gentoo systems. In the aftermath I set up an AMD XP3000 box as intranet/fileserver, and one of my workstations (after all: I wanted such a fast system for myself too .
 
All these Gentoo-setups are still running, or are valid OS' in multi-boot PCs, and if I had the time, I would even do a stage-0 install, cause, like you, I also happen to find the things one learns during a Gentoo-installation, very helpful for other admin-tasks.
 
And btw: I lurve Gary Larson, so it's a nice thing to see that Larry the Cow has escaped the "wildlife preserved"
 

Blackpage, thanks for the reply. I thought I'd ask since I've known people who thought they had to rebuild with every three month release. It's good to know I'm not the any Gentoo geek.

MEPIS for everything...

I am very new to Linux, but I've had great success with Mandrake 10.0 and just went to Mandrake 10.1 PowerPack. I did not encounter one single hardware issue with this install and it was nicely automated. I tried SUSE 9.1 and just couldn't get it to work with my system. It installed fine, but the system would freeze up after between 5 seconds and a few minutes. I had to keep one hand on the mouse and the other hand on the computer power button. First, the ethernet connection would freeze....immediately followed by the entire system freezing...You'd see the clock freeze and knew the only way out was a power button reset. I've not experienced anything like that with Mandrake. I installed a DVD burner yesterday and not a hitch. Mandrake found it and set it up the first time I powered up. As I say, I'm very new to Linux...only worked with MS for about 14 years...but Linux was all new. I wouldn't go back to MS for anything, since I've gotten Mandrake. I think much has to do with your hardware, from my limited experience.
 
zenarcher

SimplyMEPIS no contest
 
I'm running the new ProMEPIS on my laptop right now... Just gets better and better. Dapper Dan you should think about replacing your Red Hat

Originally posted by jimf43:

Quote:Dapper Dan you should think about replacing your Red Hat  
Already have at home. I'm now using Suse 9.1 Professional!
 
 

I use Fedora Core 2 (will upgrade to FC3 soon) on my main PC, and Novell Linux Desktop on my old P2 box.

How about a few custom screenies when you get it going?

Sure, I'll be happy to; did you want screenshots for FC3 or NLD?

Both would be nice!