I prefer to run on my workstation whatever is running on the environment I manage. Which is Ubuntu Server. Thus I run the same release on my workstation (14.04.

I prefer to run on my workstation whatever is running on the environment I manage. Which is Ubuntu Server. Thus I run the same release on my workstation (14.04.2 LTS), with i3wm. I find that using the same distro on my workstation aids with local testing, not to mention just improving general familiarity. You could say the workstation is a "pre-dev" environment. While I haven't necessarily switched "config" OSes, I do run Windows 8.1 at home (because gaming), and tend to use MobaXterm for remote administration. It's frustrating, mostly because I lack the "intermediary" between multiple servers. Example: I needed to grab a bunch of files from a Mikrotik (no Bash there) with the format "syslog.(number).apr.09.2015.txt", only I wanted them all formatted as "syslog.(number).txt". So I just scp them over to my workstation and: for $(ls syslog.*); do N=$(echo $i | awk -F"." '{print $2}'); mv $i syslog.$N.txt This, obviously, is sorely lacking when running a Windows machine, even with the cygwinesque wrapper they so graciously offer. I suppose this is relevant to all variants of Linux (or rather GNU/Bash), and I'm sure the same could be done on other OSes, but seeing as I work on Linux, gaining this level of familiarity can only be beneficial.