[memracom]

Two different questions. Everybody uses Windows for web development because you need to test sites on all major browsers and IE only runs on Windows. The title asks about Windows as a primary OS. Nowadays with multiple cores, lots of RAM and tools like Virtualbox it is easier than ever to use Windows as a primary OS because you can have Linux in a VM anytime you need it. I have about a dozen Linux VMs that I use for different purposes, i.e. they have different things installed, so it is easy to work with PHP one day, and Tomcat the next day. Just swap VMs. I always build the VM using the build docs for the production servers so that I match the final production system as closely as possible. That means sometimes I use a Centos VM and other times I use an Ubuntu LTS vm.