My favorite distribution is Gentoo, for 7 years now. It allows me to have all the flexibility I need (the perfect world between stability with only legacy packages or recent ones on a constantly broken system; as in Gentoo, you always have choice) and it teaches me so many things each day.

As I’m used to control everything, here is a list of kernels' configurations I use currently.

I always have a different SSH key pair per machine. The aim is to really never copy my private key from a machine to another over network or USB stick.