Funny, but by “desktop” I mean, “a piece of wood on which I have my monitors”…
For the past six weeks, I have been running an environment whereby I have XP on my main machine for development an Office applications, and use Ubuntu on a separate machine for doing everything else. As we’ve been working hard over the past year to make things we use less Microsoft-specific and less tied to our local network (e.g. SugarCRM for CRM, hosted SourceGear Vault, etc) this is working incredibly well.
Key to this is the open source Synergy application, which cunningly allows you to have a single keyboard and mouse across separate physical computers. So I have my Unubtu machine on the left with one screen, my development machine with two screens in the middle and right – all I have to do to activate my Ubunty machine is move the mouse to the left monitor and it’s ready to go.
Synergy is a little flaky however – sometimes it captures all mouse and keyboard input and refused to give it up. The only way to get around this appears to be to point a LogMeIn client session at the XP machine and kill the Synergy process. (An RDP connection won’t do it.)
I must admit to being hugely impressed with Ubuntu – if I didn’t develop everything on the Microsoft stack and be so used to using Office, I would ditch Microsoft on the desktop.
(We have our test lab running a bunch of Windows XP images on VirtualBox on Ubuntu. This works remarkably well too.)