I used to roll my own with Slackware. No time for such things these days, so I use Ubuntu...

It has been about four (4) years since I have felt the need to reconfigure a kernel.

I use the distro (Fedora) kernel - but quite often compile my own kernel modules for special drivers.

I started to build the main kernel because I wanted to do Kernel development and found the kernel was really easy to build:

https://kernelnewbies.org/KernelBuild

When I only had DOS I compiled. MS then offered GWBasic. I used that to compile a variety of apps. I got older. Completely disgusted with Windows. I switched to Ubuntu. Happy, but dumbfounded wuth Terminal. So just surviving with updated Ubuntu adorned with some much appreciated add-ons.

When in the past, Ubuntu (for a month) and mainly Debian were my desktop/production distros, I never had to do modify anything from the provided kernel. Now and recently, with Slackware, I started doing that and realized that (at least in my laptop) it adds a performance improvement (subtle in comparison to Debian, huge against Ubuntu)... Only a little and unqualified opinion.

Edit: as I never made that on the default Ubuntu kernel, I obviously can't make a real comparison...

I used to compile them, even patch them to a new version 1997 to 2004. Couple of years ago, 2014 too but it didn't solve the problem I was having with the debian wheezy I migrated to (partition copyiing) other maschine.

I did build my own kernels (and compilers) way back when I was in college, Linux version was still 0.97-0.99 at the time. But now, I've Mint on the family desktop and use the shipped kernel.
--Gait.

As upstream developer of burn software i use a shipped kernel of Debian.

Kernel 3 and 4 show substantial regressions towards 2.6 and have
insufficient fixes for old bugs (sr mutex chokes simultaneous burn,
drive tray moves in by read(2) but kernel does not wait for drive
becomming ready, end of TAO CDs is still not read properly).

I prefer to develop workarounds in userspace (/dev/sg instead of /dev/sr,
continue to use old CD TAO padding, let burn programs load the tray
before letting the kernel try to read from the medium).

Most of the time, i using kernels shipped with my distribution. I also have tried LEiquorix kernels in my Debian days.
The last 4 years i am using exclusively Slackware. Have compiled a few kernels downloading source from kernel.org.
But for the last couple of months i am running the stock (new Slackware's kernel) and i feel bored to compile again...

I use the one shipped with my distribution Ubuntu 14.04

I am a real stranger to Linux. Were it not for Ubuntu and my new favorite, Mint, I'd still be stuck in windows :-( So, I have no idea what it means to 'compile a kernel' and I want to thank whoever does it so this works.

I use the stock kernel on all production and test machines, but I've been known to go full roll-your-own in the past. Nowadays, using the stock kernel answers just about every question outside of the infosec paranoids......

Compiling just means taking source code written by a programmer and getting the computer to translate it into binary machine code. For most software, this is a largely automated process. And given the huge amount of precompiled software available from your distro's repositories, you rarely have to build anything locally anyway.

But the Linux kernel is unique in the great variety of options that can be compiled in (or not), so building it yourself can allow you to speed up booting considerably by not including drivers and other facilities that you aren't going to use.

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But if there's a newer kernel in the my distro's repository, I'll always use that