It's an excellent OS for (most C) development: it has fantastic documentation and is very good at crashing buggy programs (even better with some malloc options

It's an excellent OS for (most C) development: it has fantastic documentation and is very good at crashing buggy programs (even better with some malloc options set). It also actually installs headers, unlike many Linux distributions. (It's also an excellent firewall, server, desktop, ...) [EDIT: ... for most stuff at least. Ubuntu is shinier, and Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD is better for multithreaded number crunching.]