ArchLinux -- It satisfies my needs with the least hassle: I use a very heavily configured i3 setup that's tailored exactly to my needs for school and developing (Full DE's are clumsy and to slow on my cheap laptop), and I need recent versions of software for school IE. Eclipse since we're required to use it for Java, and LibreOffice for writing papers. Older versions of either one of those either don't work as well or don't work at all, as I have to transfer stuff to them from newer versions on school computers. (That being the newest Eclipse and MSoft Office).
I could use Ubuntu or Fedora or etc., but at that point I'd have to be continually updating to the next version to keep my software versions current enough to be used, and even then I risk my configuration breaking on the bigger upgrades and having to deal with that during the middle a semester, not very convenient. Arch has a reputation for being a lot of work, but as far as I'm concerned it's much less work to keep up-to-date then a Ubuntu install, at the very least Arch doesn't have massive breaking updates every 6 months. I have yet to have my Arch system totally crap-out on me, as long as I update my packages every few days or so, and check the Arch News before any upgrades that may cause issues, it's been extremely easy to maintain.
"check the Arch News before any upgrades that may cause issues," It took me a lot of discipline to learn that rule instead of blindly typing pacman -Syu every day.
I've been using Xubuntu for the last week, after some setup i've begun to fall in love with XFCE. I tend to flip distros every few weeks since all of my programming is done through Vagrant + offsite Git.
As far as servers go, we've been using CentOS and it's slowly built up to become a pain in the buns. I'm considering trying out Debian for our servers, but I don't want to bring my desktop distro habits over to our stack.
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS - I chose it because it matched the OS we were running on our servers, so matching environments made my life as easy as possible. I've also used Ubuntu extensively in the past, along with other linux environments (Linux Mint and ArchLinux come to mind), but went back to Ubuntu because it was my first that I spent a lot of time in. It supports everything I needed for school (LibreOffice for documents, OpenJDK for most things Java) and gives me the flexibility I need. The LTS allows me to ignore the 6 month releases and still know that I am one a supported platform.
I am a newbie dev who usually uses Heroku to deploy but I also want to know how to go about doing deployments using Chef/Puppet/Fabric and I want to know exactly how to go about doing them.
slitaz, i used to make a live cd to run GNS3/Dynamips using slax and the need to make it smaller led me to slitaz, once i began using it i ended up learning shell scripting and for a short time was a package maintainer of a few programs,then slowly picked up a little bit of web development, im no expert on it but what i know of linux, i learned due to slitaz.
I could use Ubuntu or Fedora or etc., but at that point I'd have to be continually updating to the next version to keep my software versions current enough to be used, and even then I risk my configuration breaking on the bigger upgrades and having to deal with that during the middle a semester, not very convenient. Arch has a reputation for being a lot of work, but as far as I'm concerned it's much less work to keep up-to-date then a Ubuntu install, at the very least Arch doesn't have massive breaking updates every 6 months. I have yet to have my Arch system totally crap-out on me, as long as I update my packages every few days or so, and check the Arch News before any upgrades that may cause issues, it's been extremely easy to maintain.