Do you mean the Linux kernel or are you referring to a particular distribution? I use Fedora on my laptops mostly because it is so easy to install, but I stopped using any distro for my servers quite a while back. I have used most of the major distributions at one time or another. These days, I usually build my Linux OS from source when I need it.
I have played around with freeBSD and OpenBSD a little bit. I find them to be kind of fun to play with when I need a hacker fix. I try to stay away from the BSD community, though. Linux has its share of whiners and crybabies, but BSD seems to be crawling with them.
The Linux kernel seems nice, when I say it sucks what I really mean is the bloated UI's suck. Install is great, kernal is fine. I played with Linux back in the 486 days and I really like it, small, compact implementation of Unix, better then solares 86. But a few years back I tried to use it on an old P1 and an old sun1. In both cases Linux was dog slow and I hated the different colored fonts in a shell window. I would like to find a nice no frills OS for a Apache/Tomcat/Java web server all I would really need is dialup connectivity, a good software firewall and a dynamic IP tool for auto updating name servers. At the moment I'm using windows 2000 and it's Ok, XP sucks but I am stuck with it too. I was going to buy a Mac just to get OSX but Mac is moving from PowerPC to intel so no point in buying any time soon. When I need X I can get to it via cygwin which is nice , might try putting my old AIX 2.25 on my intra net just for old time sake if I can find a t10 to t100 hardware adapter.