I don’t know how common linux is in the Sponge community, so I’ll just ask 
Personally I like the GNOME Remix of Ubuntu, but since I discovered Elementary (I knew about it before, but I installed it 2 month ago) I love it. What about you?
I’m using Linux Mint 17 on my computers. I’ve never tried Elementary though.
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I use Mint 16 with some kind of Mac OS Theme, cause im the only developer there and everyone else uses Mac. When customers come, they just don’t think, wtf.
At home im using Mint 16 (maybe 17) on my Laptop and sometimes Debian 7 on my desktop.
My server runs Debian 7 as well. (I would host / mirror on my server if needed)
Conclusion if you ignored the rest:
In my opinion Linux is great for development but sucks for nearly everything else. IMHO, it doesn’t have to be yours, please don’t start some kind of war here.
Under developers i would say, it’s pretty common to have linux at least on server side.
@Ekranos That’s exactly why I’m using Elementary 
, It just looks like Mac
You’re right, no Windows-vs-Linux war, Windows is still the best for gaming (the amount of all-linux users is still to little to have some good games ported over)…
It may be the “best”, however I do almost all of my gaming inside of Linux. Humble Bundles and Steam have really brought Linux to the attention of game developers as well.
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True, I hope there are more games comming 
and of course “best” is always relative to what games you play 
I use that on my desktop, I prefer to use Ubuntu when using Linux but I like to change it up.
Personally i use Windows a lot, mainly because i like to play Dota2 sometimes and it sucks on Linux for whatever reason. But i hate developing on Windows, compiling large projects takes pretty long cause of the filesystem. On Linux it works like a charm. But im repeating myself here.
But i see the Linux desktop coming withing the next few years, because Windows will reach some kind of barrier with theire Kernel. And things like network security are integrated in the Linux Kernel, in Windows it’s plugged on.
Definitely. Linux is far ahead in technology. There are so many customization possibilities, which you don’t have in windows. What I really wait for is native support for HTML5 desktop apps, because all those fancy frameworks are all not ideal. And I think those will come to linux first 
I think cross-platform technology will be the defacto standard anyways in a not so distant future. Just image Android (with all its API levels (they suck :{)), the Apple stuff, the Windows versions, all the different Linux distros
Everything is getting popular enough, that it can’t be ignored.
Java is a good way to do that i think, even if there is alot of lacking functionality (or often only via JNI).
Linux is nearly everytime the first, because of the vast mass of developers out there, that want to show off what they can.
Just look at stuff like C++11, it was nearly completely supported by the GCC (g++) and Microsofts compiler still don’t have all C++11 features. C++14 is on the road, GCC has alot of functionality already ^^
Windows on the other side works nearly out of the box, at least for me on 5 different computers / laptops. Just install the graphics driver and you are ready to go. Under Linux i mostly spent a whole night to get everything up and running as wished (biggest nightmare on my Acer laptop).
I still prefer Linux, because i develop stuff most of the time and it works much better for me under Linux.
Offtopic
I can’t join the IRC Channel on EsperNet.
I always get the following message:
#sponge :Cannot join channel (+r) - you need to be identified with services@Ekranos
You need to register your nick first, I think:
/msg NickServ REGISTER <some_password> <valid_email>
Follow the instructions of the message, that is coming up.
Then everytime you log you the server:
/msg NickServ IDENTIFY <some_password>
Here is a little sheatcheat on the whole NickServ thing: http://www.surrealchat.net/wiki/Help/NickServ
@GameplayJDK
Thank you! It worked for me.
I never really used IRC before. so thank you alot for the fast reply.
NixOS and Arch, here. In theory I’d like to use NixOS since it makes it very easy to keep the system clean of cruft, but the software repository (nixpkgs) is still just too small/outdated to be used on anything else than my HTPC. As a second I want to use Ubuntu, but the repositories there are just too small as well (stuff like IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and TeamSpeak is missing), so I’m stuck using Arch. The AUR sucks as well, but not quite as bad as juggling tarballs.
You’re welcome
I had to figure it out ~2h ago, so I had that link still in my browsers history ^^
@teozkr
Personally i setup Arch and Gentoo sometimes, but i wont do it again. I just wan’t everything working and not tinkering about for “ages”. I like Arch’s philosophy and how it is built. But it needs way too much time in my opinion.
Just my 2 cents.
@GameplayJDK
At least im not the only one that didn’t know how it worked.
I haven’t tried Gentoo, so I can’t comment on that.
Arch is a pain to install, but once that is done then then I find it to be much lower on maintenance than other distros I’ve tried. I switched to Ubuntu for a while, but ended up switching back because of all the stuff I had to install manually instead of just getting it from the AUR.
@teozkr
I did the same in reverse 
I switched from Arch back to Debian / Ubuntu based distros because i had to install everything manually instead of just apt-get or apt-add-repository
The needs of people can’t be different enough.
In my opinion it doesn’t matter so much which distro you use, if you are happy with it, it’s the right one for you.
In my case it’s debian based, in your case Arch :}
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I never said I’m happy about it, it’s just the one I’m the least unhappy about.
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@teozkr
I think i can quote you here for my own statement:
I never said I’m happy about it, it’s just the one I’m the least unhappy about.
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I was, but it wasn’t playing very nice with my GPU.