It depends on the situation for me. On my windows machines, I run xampp(lite) due to it's speed of installation, and the fact that I can backup my e:/xampplite folder and move it to another system and whammo! my apache/php/mysql work perfectly... Can you say portable development environment?!
If I was building a production server, or any other server for that matter, I would go the (sort of) build it yourself route. I say sort of, only because ./configure && make && make install can take way too much time so I always pick a distro (usually debian) that offers good package management, that way I can get a development/staging server setup in pretty much one command (assuming apache/et al weren't installed by default).
apt-get install apache2 mysql5 php5 etc ......
and you're done! Forgot to install a module for php?
apt-get install php5-json php5-pdo php5-pdo-mysql etc...
Note: I doubt I got any of the package names right, so don't go copy/pasting
