bt4 r2, in my opinion

You mean Back|Track 4 R2? How come it isn't on the poll?

Are you serious? This is the "Server Distribution of the Year" poll. Whilst you could run BackTrack as a server if you wanted to that is not what it is designed for. From their own site, "BackTrack has been customized down to every package, kernel configuration, script and patch solely for the purpose of the penetration tester."

It would be better to vote in Security/Forensic/Rescue Distribution of the Year, where it is actually a sensible choice.

I can only LOL on "You mean Back|Track 4 R2? How come it isn't on the poll?"

Debian - the god of operating systems... have been saying this since the past 2 years and have tried many distros but then Debian it is - everytime.

Debian

+1!

i wanted to vote for fedora but i guess the closest match would be redhat.

Fedora is a horrible choice for servers. The six month release cycle leaves almost no time for bug-squashing and Fedora has shipped with some nasty ones. Bleeding edge software contributes to the relative lack of stability. And to put the icing on the cake, each release is backed by only 13 months of support.

RHEL is a sensible choice, since Fedora is basically the test-bed for RHEL.

^ fair enough but:
i use fedora-14 (live-usb) on a personal web server for storing wedding albums and movies and songs (on a $200 acer revo). but i see what your saying... it is not meant for large enterprise type installations.

Debian, of course :) Slack could be a good 2nd choice.

I have to say, I find amusing that most linux sysadmins (around here) choose either Debian or Slack (which doesn't have a RedHat-like corporation supporting it), and not RHEL or another "Enterprise Linux" distro. Why is that? :)

Because we're smart enough to know better. Also perhaps because as a group we may tend to be:

1) working for self or small to medium businesses with tighter budgets lacking extra funds to "waste" just to get indemnity.

2) Those self/small/med businesses don't have deep enough pockets to make going after them worth while.

3) Those self/small/medium businesses have IT decision makers who're much closer to the actual technical front lines and hence have more confidence in their technical competencies, as compared to large corp CIO's that get most of their game plan from whatever happens to be the latest and greatest being pontificated in CIO magazine (and similar), i.e. they're so high up the management ladder that they've not had their hands in anything technical for years, if not decades. So going RHEL gives them "peace of mind" that there will be someone else to blame if things go horribly wrong.

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.

I've just bumped into this:
http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/02/u...lar-linux.html

It seems that on web servers, the most popular distros are actually CentOS, Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu,Fedora, Suse, and Gentoo.

As a Fedora user, I'm astonished that anyone would put it on a server! And how do system administrators find the time to set up Gentoo? It does confirm that the Slackware results here are unrepresentative.

Looks like CentOS had some kind of minor hype and most of them are reverting to Debian.
Didn't know there were so many Ubuntu webservers and so few Suse.

I guess redhat will loose even more to Ubuntu in the future but I don't think Ubuntu will be able to rise above CentOS and Debian (at least not in the next 2-3 years)

When I ask people if they had any experience with Linux the first name that comes up is Ubuntu, lots of people associate Linux to Ubuntu and I think we all should admire Ubuntu in some way because it is a distribution that made lots of people aware that there is an alternative out there and it's called Linux.

Debian is easy to configure, but it isn't that great with selinux. You really have to mess around with it. The hardening methods for Debian are well known. If you really know what you're doing, you can configure a bulletproof Debian server.

Another method is to strip out all but the most necessary packages. RHEL does this, so there's less to go wrong. But you can't do anything you want with it.

Fedora has got to be the worst possible server, except for maybe Ubuntu! Not even the people who make Fedora know exactly how it works, but it runs a lame selinux policy by default.

Slack is probably the most stable, but it's like comparing a rock to machine gun. The rock will never jam, but the machine gun generally wins. I still like slack because it's pure, raw, unadulterated Linux. It doesn't even have /etc/init.d, which is good for a server.