I dual boot Sabyon with Vista on my work laptop and have VM's of ubuntu,gentoo and DSL running on my xp box at home. I realy like sabayon and am now preparing to give slackware a go. I am voting other even though sbayon is based on gentoo (emerge is great)
I will have to admit that Fedora is my favorite, but I use Ubuntu because it Just Works (tm) on any hardware that I throw at it. That is important to me as I install Linux for lots of friends.
Gentoo. If it moves, compile it.
Debian is the best 
I've been using my Linux for a few months and I've tried different distros searching for a suitable one. When I first installed Mandriva, I was really captured by it! I've chosen it for 3 reasons:
1) it is extremely easy to use especially for people new to Linux. It seems as though Mandriva is saying to you: just work and don't be worried! I'll take care of everything;
2)It's really beautiful! Just have a look!
3) it cannot be explaied: something within me whispered - That's it!!!
Interesting, though Sabayon compared to Slackware sounds like a wee bit of contrast to me.
Currently, I use Slackware. I have not had any problems with it at all EVER. It all started when I was in middle school and my friend said to me at lunch, "You should try linux" and pointed me to zipslack, at the time I had a dial up internet connection. I tried zipslack and managed to get by reading man pages and finally connected to the web through a dial up modem and lynx (or links - I don't remember) and started wget'ing the Xfee86 packages. It was then I learned of dependencies... A few weeks later I was turned on to Debian Potato, started downloading the install cd's few days later they were finished and I started the install on my compaq presario laptop that had a 233mhz amd cpu. Finally I installed X and after much blood sweat and tears, got windowmaker running. Debian on a laptop! I thought I was hot stuff. After that I just went crazy trying everything I could find, even went to CompUSA and bought SuSe but that did not run very well on my now ancient hardware. Years went by when I put linux in the back of my mind always meaning to get back to it. Then I tried Fedora Core 6, After one week of trying to get the nvidia drivers to work, finally saw the nvidia logo pop up (thanks to Option ModeValidation "NoVertRefreshCheck" in my xorg.conf) and installed cedega and a few games, they blew away the performance of windows and fell in love and started getting everyone I knew to use it. Fighting night after night with it on other people's computers, decided to give in and download Ubuntu (edgy eft at the time). To my great suprise it installed perfectly with no extra tweaking on my brothers computer - he uses it to this day. My wife's laptop was a bit of a pain to make Ubuntu work with her sound card (I remember staying up till 7am trying to make it work, she was sleeping next to me, and I rebooted the computer and then the african drum things played for the first time. I woke her up in a fit of excitement "OMG DID YOU HEAR THAT!!!? SOUND! Now I just need to get wireless working.") It was a snap to get ndiswrapper going and since then I have been upgarding her to each new version of ubuntu, fighting with wifi and sound each time, though with the latest release the ati video card was working out of the box and therefor so did compiz. So although nobody wanted a linux autobiography, those have been the most important linux times for me. For my own machines, I do not mind spending a week compiling everything I need or rebuilding a kernel 15 times in a row to make my system just right for me. So, my vote is Slackware. Though when I build me next desktop it will be Gentoo.
Hi raidzero,
I am impressed by your Linux record.
Unfortunately, I am not that patient to get each and every device on my commodity hardware running.
Most of the times I am quite content to get a basic Unix-like OS on my private HW running that behaves and feels similar to the Unix boxes I am preoccupied with at work.
Also, usually don't make much use of X and DEs and stuff like that (never cared about Compiz). A frugal shell prompt is most I need.
So next time I am despairing over some misbehaving wlan chipset, sound or video card etc. I think I should call for your advice.
Btw, I also started my Linux experience with Slackware.
That was during my time at uni, and the main motive for me why I bothered about Linux at all, was to get a free Fortran compiler to do my study chores (I am an engineer/naval architect but not working in this field anymore).
This was at the time when the distro was meant to be copied onto a set of 20-30 floppy disks (I think even today Slackware's package section partitioning gives evidence of this history), and I was totally uninitiated and was asking myself what the heck do they mean by mounting etc.
Recently during a Linux conference I passed by a booth of the Arch folks and grabbed one of their CDs they were distributing there.
Back home I gave it a try and really liked this distro's approach.
It also brought back memories of my first Slackware experience.
I use Ubuntu because it really is friendly for a newbie like me. I've gotten a lot of helpful advice from their online community, too. I also love the lean compactness of Damn Small Linux for emergency jobs on Windows machines and popping in and out of a danger zones like cyber cafes. Trust this is helpful. The beauty of the Unix/Linux world is that it flexs to suit whatever the user needs. Vive la difference.
For anyone new to gnu linux. don't feel you are limited to using Ubuntu because of its easy installation and ease of use.
Debian has never been easier to install. The Debian Lenny release I think is the slickest Debian release yet.
If you can manage to install Ubuntu, you can install Debian Lenny. If you are new and like how easy the Ubuntu desktop is to use, you will be surprised at how easy Debian has become. Debian just takes a little longer to install with the net install disc.
I have found the new Debian to be a first class distro. Very smooth, everything works the way it should, with no tweaking.
Debian Forever.
I have to choose Slackware and it's 64 bit clones Slamd64 and Bluewhite64 because they are the most Unix-like Linux distros plus the stability, performance, security and speed are just icing on the cake. Currently I am using bluewhite64 Linux which is just an exact clone of Slackware for 64 bit processors.
While I do not always use straight Debian, I am a HUGE fan of Debian based systems, and I periodically like to try out the Debian netinst. You are right. I would nominate Debian as the MOST IMPROVED distro in terms of ease of installation. It is a bit chatty compared to some of the quick, easy to install versions, but other than that minor inconvenience, it is just about as easy as most of them, and it is far more flexible than 95% of the distributions out there, giving ground only to the source and do it yourself varieties, which are far more complicated than Debian to set up, though they do provide the ultimate in flexibility. The ground that Debian strikes is in between and a very good balance for anyone requiring flexibility.
That said, I have two desktop and three laptop systems and I have sidux installed, along with many other distros, on them. sidux is an implementation based upon Debian Sid, and it really tames Sid, particularly if you add on the smxi script, which makes maintaining the system a trivial exercise. I call it Debian Sid on mood stabilizers and steroids.
If you want something really easy, very stable, and much more conservative, go instead with SimplyMEPIS. The 8.0 release is now in Beta test - the fourth Beta. Warren Woodford produces stable builds. Early builds may lack some hardware support, but the packages work perfectly. Defect counts are low. With Beta 4, hardware support is sharply improving. SimplyMEPIS 8.0 is based upon the upcoming release of Debian Lenny and it is aready, even in test form, a superb distribution, worth a look for any tester, but also good enough to be usable already for every day use.
If you want something lighter, give the MEPIS derived antiX M7.5 a try. It uses Debian Testing, which is Lenny, so it, too, is quite stable, very fast, and it offers a choice of Fluxbox or IceWM as the two default window managers to reduce the footprint.
All three of these have Debian foundations and are of high quality and I do not hesitate to recommend any of them. It all depends on what you need. If you want more control, then opt for the real thing, Debian, using the netinst. You cannot go wrong with any of these fine alternatives.
That is what I have moved to from first RedHat 7, through to 9, then Mandrake 9 through 9.2, then Suse 9.3 to 10.2, and now PCLinux.
I voted for Ubuntu because it faster and easy to use.
My vote goes to Archlinux.
I have stopped my distro dance because its so fast and snappy.
I started on a Slackware distro that was on linux format around 2002. Talk about starting out on a hard distro. I then bought a Red Had version from the news agent and loved it till they ceased production and continued with Fedora.
I've hopped from Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and even a couple of the Bsd's.
But Arch is it for me. I'm doing so many more tasks via the cli now, which is the way I like it.
Also, Awesome window manager is the bomb!
At the moment I'm using OpenBSD on my laptop. The reason I chose OpenBSD is, it ran very nicely on my Mac when I first decided to wet my feet with a true Unix-like OS (not Apple's OS). It's been running pretty nicely overall, but I have come to miss some things I have become accustomed to, like a journaling file system and the ability to load adobe flash content (I can load videos that use flash version 7, but that's about it). Oh, and I don't want to have to compile Java again 
So, I plan on backing up my user files, and installing a different OS. Initially, I was thinking about PC-BSD, and then I was thinking about OpenSolaris, but increasingly, I have been considering Linux.
The main choice of linux distributions for me at the moment is between CentOS and Ubuntu. I'm leaning towards Ubuntu, since apt-get seems to have very good package management capabilities. On the other hand, I remember an incident a while back where a Debian developer screwed up OpenSSL and, well, I found it worrying that something like that could happen.
I voted for Suse because it is very secure and has good support.
I voted Mandriva as a personal favorite as it has a nice mature set of tools in it's MCC (Mandriva Control Center) and has a nice package manager (urpmi). I know many users love synaptic and others but I have really enjoyed urpmi's ease of config and use in the MCC and on the command line.
Also, the OS install GUI is nice as well.
That said, all servers I have administrated in production environments have been RedHat or a RedHat clone.
While RedHat is quite mature I prefer CentOS as it is an exact clone of RedHat and even uses rhel rpm's that they get freely from source repositories from RedHat! This allows the download of updates WITHOUT a subscription cost and allows the distro to remain free. With pure RedHat you must pay for a subscription to get the updates and update/errata notices.
DreamLinux is my favorite distro of Linux.
I used RedHat ,ubuntu,Freebsd,but I think fedora is the best;so i am using it now!
And then ,i wish everybody can love linux too, good luck!!!