The only OSses I use are UNIX OSses. I don't do Windows. Never did, never will. My 3 year old nephew knows more about Windows than I do, and I like to keep it that way. My preference goes to Solaris, but at the moment I don't have much access to one. (Only when I'm giving Solaris training, but that doesn't leave much time for development.) I'm a consultant, so I don't have a fixed place to work, but at my current main gig, I mostly use Linux and HP-UX. At home, I use Linux (but for my next box, I'd like to try some BSD member of the UNIX family).

I don't consider the question "which distribution of Linux?" to be very relevant. The only time I use a distribution is when initially installing the OS - for the rest it's just ftp, tar xfvz, ./configure, make, su, make install. I've used at least SLS, Slackware, RedHat, Debian, Suse and Rock over the years, and they all suck. Some more than others.

As for tools, I use the X Window System as GUI, with fvwm2 as window manager. The look and feel of my desktops (whether it's on Solaris, Linux or HP-UX) hasn't changed much in many years. I've been using 'vile' as my preferred editor for over a decade - but since that isn't standard, I use 'vi' a lot as well. That's everywhere. Shells: bash if it's available, otherwise ksh or sh. Mail is viewed and send using mutt (or mail if necessary), while slrn deals with Usenet. And that's about it when it comes to essential tools (well, the content of /bin and /usr/bin is there as well of course). For document making, I use LaTeX. Presentations I do with magicpoint (with the help of m4, make and xfig). Drawings are made with xfig, plots and graphs with gnuplot. Assorted useful tools: C compiler, make, ImageMagic, netpbm. Except for magicpoint, I've been using these tools for years, many since the '80s and early '90s. Some of my vi-macros are almost 20 years old. I'm conservative. I don't easily change my toolset. Experience often beats new features.

Abigail