I'm partial to Gentoo for a few reasons, but honestly most distros are going to work out just fine for development work. If you're doing enterprise development

I'm partial to Gentoo for a few reasons, but honestly most distros are going to work out just fine for development work. If you're doing enterprise development, you might want to look towards RHEL, Fedora, or CentOS. If you're doing all work in virtual environments, you might want to just install ESX, but 275GB isn't going to hold a lot of different environments.