After 10 years of service, my old linux box finally gave up so I bought a basic tower to run Linux on. I've got to say that Fedora 19 was very easy to install and get working. Just as with Windows 8, I think the new Gnome 3 interface is an improvement once one is accustomed. Although I did tweak a few things with the tweak tool.
These days, I use a setup of Win7/64 running on a macmini (you read that right - I run windows on my macmini). This machine is used to play back HiRes audio and runs a host of electronics and audio analysis software. This also has a Java development environment and cygwin installed.
My Linux box, which is a basic Acer tower (2nd cheapest in PC world) is an i3 with 4GB ram which is more than adequately spec'ed for a dev box. Installed on it is a recent MySQL, ApacheMQ, Maven, Java 7, Groovy and IntelliJ. In case I decide to play with any native stuff or device driver wriing, I'll probably install codeblocks for C++.