Note the lack of RedHat, CentOS, Oracle, SLES int al from this list because:

Lots of people seem to like the old, “traditional” model of a distribution and use RHEL, SLES, CentOS or the “LTS” Ubuntu release. Those distros pick a specific kernel version and then camp out on it for years, if not decades. They do loads of work backporting the latest bugfixes and sometimes new features to these kernels, all in a Quixote quest to keep the version number from never being changed, despite having many thousands of changes on top of that older kernel version.

For many years I used to roll my own and actually enjoyed going through menuconfig. My first was make config on a Slackware distro (or was it Yggdrasil?) kernel version 1.99-alpha or something from memory but looking at the WP page I had an old distro then judging by the timescale. I think it was a CDROM off the back of a book. make config took about 20-30 mins on a 2.2 kernel (from memory). I've still got a couple of Gentoo systems with kernels that were carefully genkernel'd from around 2.4 or perhaps 2.6 32 bit through to 64 bit systems today. They are classic examples of "Trigger's Broom": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ship_of_Theseus_exampl...

Nowadays apt and pacman and co do the job for me. However, I know I can still always crank out the source into /usr/src/linux (symlink) and roll my own - smashing!