I've used Windows XP and Ubuntu for PHP development over the last year. Each with their unique tools, community, look and feel. Today I conclude that Windows XP is best. For testing I used VMware and the latest version of the OS plus updates and service packs. Initially I favored Ubuntu and slagged off Microsoft at every opportunity, but as time passed by I slowly realised, you get what you pay for.

Ubuntu performs much slower than XP on my x86 chipset, applications lack stability and often crash without an explanation why. FileZilla for example, was the best GUI FTP client on Ubuntu, and even that was a port from Windows. When trying to transfer more than 500 files via SFTP the application would terminate unexpectedly. Wireless support was poor which made it difficult to roam between locations and troubleshoot any connectivity issues. If working behind a proxy you would need to make text based configuration changes, line by line, to get SVN working.

With Windows XP, Notepad++, Tortoise SVN, xAMP and WinSCP I found a stable and speedy development platform. I wanted to be special, I wanted to be different than my Windows colleagues, but the bottom line is, Windows XP rocks.

Cheers
Ryan Partington

In a nutshell from someone I have faith in

[MikeSeth] says: if you need speed and not features, mysql is the answer - as would be the case for most web sites
[MikeSeth] says: but if you want to do serious data processing (e.g. maintaining materialized copies of analyses you perform on large sets of data, using stored procs/triggers etc) then mysql is poor

Cheers
Ryan Partington