No, there is no shoot-out whatsoever, silly! :)
Just like standards, linux distributions are far too many – each one catering to the personal whim of the "developer(s)". However, there are just a handful of distributions that get so much support from loyal users. I, for one, have gone from Slackware to Mandrake/Mandriva to Red Hat/Fedora and now Ubuntu and who knows, soon Solaris, i.e. if I can only install it properly on my Macbook Pro. :)
Whilst I do not claim to be even an inch of who ESR is but Eric S. Raymond just dumped Fedora for Ubuntu.
I have watched Ubuntu rise to these challenges as Fedora fell away from them. Canonical's recent deal with Linspire, which will give Linux users legal access to WMF and other key proprietary codecs, is precisely the sort of thing Red-Hat/Fedora could and should have taken the lead in. Not having done so bespeaks a failure of vision which I now believe will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future.
How about you, what is your distro of choice?