As a Sysadmin I have 2 cents to add to this discussion.

I think the whole chest beating, king of the hill, stand taking, mantra repeating is juvenile. There is no superior OS. As I do my job I don't start out figuring how I can slide my favorite distro into the equation. The OS is not at the center of decision making. What we want to get done is at the center.

The beginning point is typically the application or service, and sometimes the application and service combined with the given hardware. Given these requirements, then we find an OS which supports them.

As far as stability is concerned, I can't remember the last time something konked out on me because of a kernel bug. If something goes weird these days I'm most often to find hardware is the problem. We currently run over a dozen of each of Redhat Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD, and two Debian servers.

If someone has high uptimes they just don't believe in kernel security updates - it is nothing to be proud of.

I'd like to see a resource which promotes intelligent decision making coming from the point of view of supporting the application or hardware, as this is essentially the angle I believe a sysadmin is coming from. For example, no where in this have I heard a peep about backup software. Anyone serious about IT is serious about backup. Yet there is no support for EMC (Legato) Networker in FreeBSD, and this is why our organization is migrating away from this FreeBSD. So for example, you can outline what backup options are available compared to Linux.

--Donald