Comment: Who uses Linux (as a Desktop)?

My laptop is dual boot, as I do win32 desktop development and linux driver/app work. I run KDE, which is good, but quirky, not as stable as WinXP, but very usable. Most of the basics are there under the OpenSuse 10.1 installation: chat, pdf, msoffice docs, photo edit/gimp, etc. (I did have considerable trouble with the music player though.)

OpenOffice has been fine for reading Word, Excel & Powerpoint, but if I have serious doc work to I boot the Win side, because I don't have time to deal with problems I've heard of in those apps.

I have a server that I put Gnome on as an experiment. I don't log into it often, but Gnome seems somewhat cleaner than KDE...read that simpler on first look, but perhaps not quite as tool/feature rich...I need more time with Gnome before making that claim with authority. At least, I haven't seen some of the quirks I've seen in KDE.

Also, the graphics performance of X on my laptop is noticeably slower than windows...full rez photo jpgs take noticeably longer to draw, though we're talking the different between less then .1s on win and maybe .25-.5s on linux. My adapter is dual display, but I haven't yet figured out how to enable the analog side on linux. I suspect these are driver related and may have solutions if I had time to pursue them.

Finally, neither is as stable or polished as the Mac OSX. If I didn't do win32 dev, I would give that platform serious consideration.

Oh, and for PHP dev: that's more a question of what coding tools you find most productive. I use emacs, which has support just about everywhere. I have used Zend for a PHP commercial website (which has some very nice debugger integration), and that runs everywhere, too.