I've been using Linux on Servers and Desktop for almost 10 years now, and I still think that's a hard question to answer. On my desktop I use ubuntu, but I would definitely not use it on a server, it would require a hell of a lot of work to get it to be a decent server. Some years ago I used to install Red Hat on the servers, and if you are a beginer on Linux that's what I would advise, the Fedora Core. I usually install Gentoo on my servers, but if you don't have a steady Linux background that's probably not a good idea. When I say Gentoo I could be saying any other distro where you have full control of all the installation and administration process like slackware. As for Debian, I hear a lot of people praising it but each time I installed it on a server I finished regreting it as they have some weird pre-configurations and configuration files tree for some things and are very purists in others. As an example I could refer vi and apache. Vim as been around forever, and comes with pretty usable pre-configurations in most distros since at leas when I started using Linux but debian still comes with an unconfigured vi for default, not vim. Oposed to that, apache comes with some strange configurations and some strange directory structure and files for the configuration files.