We use FreeBSD. Seriously, any linux server operators out there give it a go. It has a steeper learning curve and can be quite tedious to set up, but seriously its very hard to knock over. We have a box with 4 years up time (and before the kernel upgrade requiring a reboot, it was 2).

I use OpenBSD and FreeBSD for production servers (depending on use). OpenBSD has one spot in the install that is troubling (the partitioning), but, to me, is really easy to setup. FreeBSD is a little harder, but I chalk that up to being away for a good many years.

They are both pretty robust and FreeBSD is really good when loaded.

With Linux clearly ahead, I'd be interested to see a "Which Linux distro(s) are you running in your production environment".

Exclusively Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, managed with Landscape and Puppet. Normalizing the environment is crucial when managing a non-trivial amount of servers. LTS is very nice when it comes to production servers, stable updates, stuff rarely breaks, it's universal and almost guaranteed to be supported by more exotic closed-source software.

Upgrading to next LTS is usually painless, this hopefully goes for the upcoming version too.

I choose Solaris because Joyent's SmartOS is the only way to get CPU bursting on their cloud service (my only gripe with them).

I'm not sure I understand what you said :-/

The reason we are using Solaris (aka SmartOS) is because Joyent only supports CPU bursting on Solaris.

They also offer other OS's but they don't have the burstable cores.

http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/smartmachines/features/

Thanks! I had no idea.

You should probably split Linux into multiple Distros. That would be interesting.

Windows is only a little higher-polling than "BSD". Why is that? If you look at Diomedis Spinellis' "Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software" (http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/jrnl/2012-JSS-OSS-Industry-Use/...) you'd expect to see Windows in the lead. as Hacker News seems like one of those places where "highly-productive employees and in rapidly growing and volatile organizations" are active.

I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind the use of Windows, by those who voted, if those applications are not .NET (obviously it's understandable using Windows in that case).

I would bet most of the windows voters use .NET, we use .NET in our main application layer.

Ubuntu, sadly. But it's what is kind of the default on EC2 and also what the customer wanted us to deploy.

I'd rather go for Debian or FreeBSD, and that's what my own boxes are running, mostly.

Linux all the way

Linux.CentOS