I've had Linux in one form or the other since the very early release days
(0.something). I've never found it for use as a desktop system (especially
GUI) particularly compelling. I think many folks secretly hold the same
opinion, else why the rise of products like Wine? And there are some areas
where it really is deficient--multimedia for example. Specialized apps are
another area--I've never found a really good WYSIWYG musical notation
editor for Linux.
For doing real work, I like command line interfaces, so I keep a Linux
system around that I can telnet into from my Windows desktop. I might be
tempted to use a Mac as a desktop machine, but my customers in general
don't, so it's best to live where they do, so to speak.
My mail and net server is Linux and I change distros there when I change
hardware--every few years. There's no reason to do otherwise--the new
distros aren't as a rule faster and the server basically never crashes
since it's always doing the same thing day after day.
As far as distros go, I started with Slackware, but have been using RH for
some time, simply because I've been using RH for some time.. It really
doesn't matter all that much--RH does tend to be very spotty in its
releases--you can often find some very old release of a package in their
distros--and they have the RH way of doing things. Debian isn't bad but
can get to be very confusing and verbose during installation--and help in
making choices is often difficult to find. I've also tried SuSE and it's
pretty good.
But mostly, I want to install the blasted thing and be done with it.
Others have observed the bloat in Linux and I agree. I started running it
on an 8MB 386 and it was pretty snappy. I don't think that feat could be
reproduced with any of the current distros.
Cheers,
Chuck