the best work i've done was on my old thinkpad r40 with freebsd and ion3. my absolute favourite window manager for productivity
also i was working a lot with and on freebsd, otherwise i have no objections to linsux
but these days i use a macbook with default osx interface. i lacked a lot of shit on my freebsd thinkpad. the only thing it was good at was work, irc and basic media stuff
since i refused to install linsux-compat so i could have luxuries like flash because i don't like virtual systems or machines on another os, it was like stepping into the futures when i got my mac
and i have all my told tools on mac too, vim, tcsh, gcc and whatever i need.