If I have a choice at all, I don't use Linux and prefer OpenBSD.
Why? Well since you asked:
- man pages are complete and accurate and they treat mistakes in them like serious bugs. This alone is worth using OpenBSD.
- also, man pages are man pages not stubs that point you at texinfo and blah blah blah
- unparalleled record on security, though I would readily admit you can take Linux and make it very secure. However, OpenBSD has many security features (both in the kernel and user-facing configurables) that Linux has not caught up to yet. securelevel is one I particularly like - set your logs to append-only/firewall rules to immutable/etc., then switch securelevel so no one can change those settings without rebooting.
- no systemd
- it's more of the environment I learned back when I was first using Unix in the SunOS 4 days - one environment, not pieced together from a dozen projects. i.e., the source code for the entire OS is one tree, not a bunch of knitted-together projects with inconsistencies.
- everything just works
- the release songs are a lot better than the Linux distro release songs...wait...you Linux people...you don't even get a free song when a new version of your distro is released!?!?
Not that I hate Linux or anything - this is just my preference.
If I have to use Linux, then
- CentOS if it's going to run some commercial app because they tend to support CentOS best
- If I have a choice, Debian but only because I've used it long enough that I've memorized all its quirks - then again, I could say the same thing about CentOS.
VPS providers tend to always have these, and they are also the most google-support-desk easy. Ubuntu is another competitor there but I don't usually use Linux on the desktop (I know it can be a server too).
I ran Slackware in the floppy years, then Gentoo for years. Might go back to it if you weird Linux people are going to keep up with this "we want svchost.exe!" systemd nonsense :lol: