My Linux distribution of choice - and, consequently, my operating system of choice - is Gentoo. However, from time to time I'm getting requests from customers to install some Linux servers or desktop computers in their places. Gentoo takes a lot of effort for an in-place installation and a)I don't have the time for that b)the customer won't pay for all that time anyway.
Ultil recent times, I used to install Slackware - which I like a lot because it's simple and clean. However, there are always been things which I didn't like in Slackware: lack of a dependency resolution system in the package manager, impossibility to upgrade the system without actually destroying it, and some weird Pat's choices. Moreover, Pat recently dropped Gnome support from mainline Slackware, and Gnome is precisely the desktop environment I use and install.
So I decided to grab all the relatively well-known distributions and to test them out. I tried CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and many others - but they were all really too bloated in my opinion. I then decided to give Arch a try, as I heard good words about it around the internet and... bingo, I found what I was looking for!
Arch is, basically, as clean as Slackware (if not cleaner), but provides a great package manager with a dependency resolution system. It's also easy to update your system, and there's a nice policy for the updating of configuration files (even though probably not as advanced as Gentoo's). Also, the community is big (and growing), and very helpful.
I liked Arch so much that I decided to install it on my laptop. So now I'm half a Gentoo and half an Arch Linux user. I just hope to find time to contribute to both projects somehow. ;-)
