The login shell is that shell that comes up when you either login on the commandline or start a terminal emulator on the GUI.
There are also other types of shells, for example the system shell, which for example is Dash on Debian, because nit is faster for non-interactive purposes.

I personally use Zsh, mostly because its superior completion (compared with the shells I used already), very good globbing features (which often times make the use of complex find commands unnecessary) and because it is easily extensible.

Zsh with syntax highlighting, in Vi mode with status indicator in a prompt on the right side, showing off a very simple globbing example and completion: http://slackeee.de/stuff/zsh.png

Bash

Favorite login shell: tcsh and close runner up, plain sh

Liked login shells: tcsh, csh, sh

Used login shells: tcsh, csh, sh, bash, dash (dash as interactive non-login)

bash - more powerful than its ancestor /bin/sh (circa 1969) yet lightweight and flexible. Enduring standard although scripting is shifting to python, more and more, for better and worse.

bash

only used bash, never heard of the other ones. not surprising in the 3 or 4 days of mint use

Here are some ways you can find out. Type in any one of these commands at the shell command line. But if you're running a recent version of Linux and no one went out of his way to change it, you're almost undoubtedly running bash (and for good reason, as these poll results suggests).

RedAssShell from RedAss.com for all Distros

Serendipity7000, us newbies will just have to stay out in the cold, I wonder if all these posters actually know what it's about, seeing nobody seems anble to tell us!

The result here is a foregone conclusion: most of us use what we're given. The only Linux I can remember defaulting to anything other than bash is Arios, which uses zsh.

I used to love the shell on my Sinclair QL, full of mysterious things like "dup" (i.e. "cd ..") and the ability to set keyboard shortcuts in my boot script with commands like
ert hot_cmd(x, "prog_use 'win1_psion_' : ex xchange_exe")
to get Alt-x to run the office suite.

Bash, of course. It's familiar and powerful. I've never found a need for anything else to be honest.

bash OR tcsh - I use both interchangeably.

Definitely bash.

I like zsh. Grab an Arch ISO and boot into it, Arch by default uses zsh. Very nice.

HAHA! The difficulty for old salts who spend their days in a shell trying to explain "what it is" to you greenies, is that there is no common frame of reference to make such an explanation meaningful!

By analogy, consider if someone who has only ever travelled by train were to make a visit to a formula 1 pit area. Fascinated by the unfamiliar machines, they ask the driver, "What is this round thing? What does it do?", referring to the steering wheel. The experienced driver may reply, "It allows me to control where the car goes.", but that hardly tells the train rider anything useful about the importance of the wheel to the complex interaction between driver and car at speed on the track!

So please don't think the old timers unhelpful, just stay in the driver's seat long enough and it will all become clear!

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