I would choose whichever one you are most comfortable with, or the one that you want to learn. If you don't know any, just choose one that sounds the most inter

I would choose whichever one you are most comfortable with, or the one that you want to learn. If you don't know any, just choose one that sounds the most interesting. This is one of those "religious" choices between computer geeks and is of little consequence in the long run. If you hack with other people, you'll get experience with several flavors anyway. I personally use Debian, and highly recommend it. It's very easy to get started out-of-the-box and there are tons of tutorials on how to get your typical LAMP setup or Rails or anything else set up. Ubuntu's also great, and probably has an even more supportive community than Debian.