In woodworking there are 2 basic distinct ways to cut dovetails: One, buy a jig, a router and appropriate bits. Put your panels in the jig, cut the tails and pins with the router and it usually fits. Most people which don't have two left hands can do this without too much effort and skill. You must have the correct size of wood panel, and the dovetails are always equal, no matter the panel dimensions. Second way, design your dovetails by hand so they match the design and your taste, scribe them off, saw and cut the pins, then the tails. It takes some effort to learn (but not as much as you'd expect), it is a bit slower (but not much if you count to the time to set up the jig), but the result is much more satisfying and, is more beautiful and looks aesthetically correct. I definitely prefer the second way.

Guess which is the Windows way and which is the Linux way.

jlinkels

My advice is use whatever you are comfortable with. You won't see a lot of difference between the distributions as you will be using the same tools. For example, Eclipse is the same on Red Hat, Slackware, Ubuntu, etc. The method of installing it changes though. Debian will seem familiar to you (apt-get install <program name>). Red Hat/Fedora won't be too unfamiliar (yum install <program name>). Hell, even Gentoo (emerge <program name>).

One reason I use Slackware is because it doesn't rely on any particular repository. If I want to change to a different version of make, for example, I simply create a new package, remove the old one and install the new one. You can do this on other distributions, but doing so feels wrong to me. Another is I'm not a fan of rolling distributions (I had so much breakage in Arch :$).

I have tried development on Windows. I didn't like it. I didn't mind visual studio, but adding new libraries was a mess. I might have been doing it wrong, but it wasn't easy.

I have given other Free OS's a go, but none stuck. I tried various BSD operating systems over the years, as well as Solaris. Solaris wouldn't see my keyboard so that went in the bin. PC-BSD was ok, but new at the time. Tried FreeBSD more recently, but I wanted to install it to a second hard drive, and it wouldn't see it. NetBSD saw it, but refused to recognise itself when it booted. OpenBSD had the same issue as FreeBSD. For all its problems, Linux works damn well.