What's the best distribution?

[Bob Keyes]

personally, I find Debian to be the best. Not to say I don't have issues
with it, but I like the fact that the package system actually works, that
it is really easy to follow either a stable branch or an advanced branch
of updates, that it works very well in text mode (handy for servers),
and supports ham radio well. What I don't like is the rough edges -- too
many dialog boxes that ask for obscure settings. I am a pretty technical
user but am still put off by all this, I imagine it would be quite
disheartening to the novice user. Though most of the time you just choose
the default and things are fine. I also don't like the fact that a lot of
cruft is added on as a default -- I don't like emacs for instance, why do
I get it by default? However this is a common problem with operating
systems these days so it doesn't rank that high on hits against debian.
The last thing that annoys me is this insistance on GNU/Linux. I want to
call it linux, and will. I don't want to get into a political discussion
so I'll drop it here.