Since very early on in my professional career I have been afforded the luxury of running Linux exclusively on my own hardware, and most of my administration experience and programming work has been primarily done with Linux or Unix like operating systems. Having dabbled in maybe a dozen or so systems, and supporting several as a part of work duties, I just really like the way Linux runs. My Linux work environment is fine tuned to the Nth degree of precision, though it does take the occasional fiddling to keep all the ants marching in the same direction. These days I have settled into a happy symbiosis with Debian unstable. Possibly because I am a micro-managing control freak, or possibly because I am the kind of person who finds patching, configuration, and compiling a new kernel fun, I keep apt away from the kernel bits and build my own from kernel.org source.