Recommendations?

[rabbit]

I've got a spare box that I'm going to play around with.  I don't have a real goal with it right now other than to experiment, since I've only had experience with Slackware and Fedora (and about a week of Gentoo, which failed miserably).  Eventually I might want to get a couple giant HDs and make a fileserver, though I've had negative amounts of luck getting any kind of Linux working with my network (it can connect, but can't see/share with my Windows boxes).  I was thinking about trying BSD since nslay seems to have nothing but love for it.  Any other suggestions that aren't (K|X)Ubuntu?

[Newby]

Give FreeBSD a try! It's nice, and the 7 release has a journaling filesystem.

Ports is sweet.

[wires]

ArchLinux is for the win.

[Sidoh]

Any other suggestions that aren't (K|X)Ubuntu?

Ubuntu! 

( Your regular expression is broken. )

[rabbit]

It wasn't meant to be a regular expression, just a pseudo-regular expression.

[MaDDoG]

I've got a spare box that I'm going to play around with.  I don't have a real goal with it right now other than to experiment, since I've only had experience with Slackware and Fedora (and about a week of Gentoo, which failed miserably).  Eventually I might want to get a couple giant HDs and make a fileserver, though I've had negative amounts of luck getting any kind of Linux working with my network (it can connect, but can't see/share with my Windows boxes).  I was thinking about trying BSD since nslay seems to have nothing but love for it.  Any other suggestions that aren't (K|X)Ubuntu?

You can try Mandriva. I used it but then migrated to Ubuntu.

[nslay]

I've got a spare box that I'm going to play around with.  I don't have a real goal with it right now other than to experiment, since I've only had experience with Slackware and Fedora (and about a week of Gentoo, which failed miserably).  Eventually I might want to get a couple giant HDs and make a fileserver, though I've had negative amounts of luck getting any kind of Linux working with my network (it can connect, but can't see/share with my Windows boxes).  I was thinking about trying BSD since nslay seems to have nothing but love for it.  Any other suggestions that aren't (K|X)Ubuntu?

FreeBSD has treated me well over the years.  I use it as a workstation, router, alarm clock, and general purpose computing.  I have it running on 2 laptops, 1 P2 router, and a P2 system that functions as an alarm clock (It plays Talking Heads).

FreeBSD as a workstation
With a large ports systems, FreeBSD usually has what you're looking for to get the job done.  Some software companies also develop for FreeBSD (e.g. Opera).  I have yet to run into compatibility issues between Windows or Linux and I work in an environment with mixtures of Linux and Windows.

FreeBSD for development
FreeBSD is superior to develop on than Linux (even Windows is better documented!) since it extensively documents its API ... where my Linux system at work is missing documentation or detail, I find it in the FreeBSD man pages.  It does lack a bit on kernel-level API documentation, but it is truly superb for userland development.  FreeBSD also has elegant API to do non-POSIX-capable things like querying and setting WiFi parameters, grabbing and setting system information, and tapping into system-event queues...Linux lacks in these areas SUBSTANTIALLY!

FreeBSD ABI support
FreeBSD is one of the few operating systems capable of natively running foreign binaries.  FreeBSD can presently run HP-UX, SunOS, etc, and even Linux 2.4 and 2.6 (as of 7.0) binaries.

FreeBSD security
FreeBSD offers advanced auditting features, contributed by McAffee and Apple, as well as the TrustedBSD project, for doing fine grain logging with a whole lot of flexibility.  It comes with OpenBSD's pf which is an excellent firewall (a 3rd party Windows firewall was even developed on OpenBSD pf).  FreeBSD also offers anti-rootkit measures like securelevels and jail.  It also makes a dandy wirless AP and/or LAN router.  It supposedly has a great network stack that performs well under load.

FreeBSD for general purpose computing
FreeBSD ports provide plethora of common desktop applications.  These include everything from window managers to office applications to games.  One can browse statistics and available applications at http://www.freshports.org/.

You won't notice much of a difference between Linux and FreeBSD unless you administer your own...and boy do you  notice.  FreeBSD is consistent and well documented.  The consistency is hard to explain since it is broad...but a great example is FreeBSD ifconfig vs Linux iwconfig+ifconfig.  I touched upon documentation regarding API, but even userland utilities are better documented than many Linux counterparts.

One major disadvantage of FreeBSD is lack of support from commercial entities.  Some support exists, nVidia, Marvell and others produce binary blob drivers for FreeBSD, and some consulting firms also support FreeBSD, but it is not as broad as Linux.  One black eye is Adobe Flash is not supported on FreeBSD except by enabling Linux compatibility.
FreeBSD does not support as many file systems as Linux and although it supports the most common ones, it generally does not support full operations on them (e.g. writing).
As of 7.0
FAT(full), NTFS(partial,can't always write), ext2(full)/ext3(partial, no journaling), UFS(full), UFS2(full), ZFS(full), XFS(partial) and some others.  But clearly this lacks behind Linux.  One workaround is to use fuse...FreeBSD does support fuse.

If you have the time, I recommend taking the time and reading the FreeBSD handbook to learn FreeBSD.  The handbook, like FreeBSD documentation in general, is very high quality.  If not, you can try PC-BSD, which is an easy to use FreeBSD distribution (much like Ubuntu)...the project is backed by commercial entity iXsystems.

So, these are some of my opinions...take it or leave it.

EDIT: And believe me, much more can be said...just lack of time.