A little while back, I put up this wiki page in order to determine what is generally viewed as:

• The best operating system for development
• The best operating system for production
• The best IDE

Thus far, a group of passionate Windoze lovers have managed to put it at the top for development, but it seems settled that Linux is "the man" when it comes to production. Eclipse seems to take the day as well. I personally vacillate between Eclipse and the greatest editor ever, vi.

I have to say, Linux with a 2.6 kernel (but not the bizzare Redhat backported 2.6 threadmodel to 2.4 hybrid that they sadistically put in RHES 3.0 which mostly just crashes Java on a good day) with Sun JDK 5.0 is a pretty impressive combination for performance.

I am somewhat shocked that Solaris didn't make a bigger showing. I've yet to see too many really large successful deployments that weren't Solaris. Save your comments for the wiki showdown (but respect the brevity).