Linux Mint
From Wildsong
I switched to Mint 14 a couple weeks ago, on my desktops.
I was tired of having to nuke Unity every time I installed Ubuntu, then when testing 12.10 I saw Amazon popping up in local searches and that was the last straw. Message to Canonical: set it to OPT IN not OPT OUT.
(To me,) Mint is Ubuntu with a reasonable user interface.
For servers I still favor Debian though Dart runs CentOS due to the requirements for ArcGIS Server.
GIS notes
Can't get the latest to install so I simply did this for now.
apt-get install qgis apt-get install gnuplot gpsbabel gpstrans python-rpy2 xml2 hdf4-tools ogdi-bin python-nose
This gives me Wroclaw release of Quantum GIS. The second line is a subset of suggested items.
python-nose??? I think it's a unit testing thing.