I'm using Redhat myself, but that's just today. Thought I'd stir the pot a little more, though. Who says you have to switch to a different OS at all? Cygwin provides a fairly convincing UNIX-y layer to add to your windows machine. You get most of the tools that are available to the rest of us (heck, I was serving my site from Apache under Cygwin while I organized things for a fresh Linux install, and played with perl and python and ruby, too), but you don't have to give up any of the Windows tools you may have gotten familiar with. Heck, you won't even have to reboot to get to them!

Cygwin isn't a perfect solution, but it's a nice holdover while you figure out whether to grab a Linux or BSD distro, or save up for a shiny new Mac w/ OS X :-)

Just one more option for you to think about...

"All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."-- Mark Twain