I do a lot of creating like the imagery and such on my XP desktop. I like to have total control from my mouse. I have Photoshop and Dreamweaver on my desktop and Photoshop on my Vista laptop. I do text creations and play around with scripting in VB and Java, but lately I have been just finding easy coding online. So I do a lot of text oriented stuff on the laptop because it is crunching buttons.

Lately I haven't done too much with servers. I just try to do my pages and then upload onto Astahost. I would like to setup a little in house network server on Windows Standard... probably because it is just a basic setup. But for now it is setup and transfer to and from desktop to laptop.

The laptop has better specs than the desktop, so that is why I am able to do the really good scouting online for scripts, and I use Word to just do my postings and entries, and all of the text oriented for my forums and webpage.

I have:

1. OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2
2. Web Server: Debian Linux
3. Database: MySQL database
4. Dynamic page language: PHP
5. Page designer:Adobe Dreamweaver
6. Graphic Designer: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator or logos as such.

Production Environment: Debian Stable or firewalled Windows platform
Server: Apache HTTP Server + mod_ssl
Database Management: MySQL Database Server with phpMyAdmin
Scripting Language: PHP + MySQL support (XHTML 1.0 Strict DOCTYPE)
Editor: Notepad++ / Quanta plus
Image Manipulation: Adobe Photoshop 7.0 (even works with Win32 application layer under Linux - e.g. WINE) or GNU Image Manipulation (GIMP)
Platforms: Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x - 7.x, Opera and Lynx
Network: Router firewall with port forwarding
FTP: PureFTPd or Filezilla FTP Server for Win32 platforms
Remote Administration: SSH or OpenSSH for Win32 platforms
Monitoring: Snort IDS with ACID or other OSS IDS for tracking web exploits targeting poorly designed PHP code.
Apache HTTP Server Testing: M****ploit *****work
Website Validation Tools: W3C and Website Optimization Analyzer (see Google)

Well, I use:

1. OS: Windows XP
2. Web Server: WAMP while localhost, LAMP if on a Linux server
3. Database: MySQL database
4. Dynamic page language: PHP
5. Page designer: PHP Designer, Zend Studio.
6. Graphic Designer: GIMP

I prefer

1. OS: Windows XP SP2 (need to test sites in IE), or else Ubuntu
2. Web Server: Astahost, XAMPP on localhost (on Windows 98)
3. Database: MySQL database
4. Dynamic page language: PHP
5. Page designer: Notepad++
6. Graphic Designer: GIMP

I would design all in Ubuntu using gedit but unfortunately I need to test my sites in Internet Explorer and Safari. I don't like using WYSIWYG software because I prefer my site to be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. I do not find WYSIWYG editors particularly helpful anyways. PHP Designer is ok, I've tried it before.

I love PHP Designer, I download the trial of the pro version and I'm thinking of buying it!

About testing your sites in IE in Ubuntu, why don't you use Browsershots? www.browsershots.org
I have to use that to test things in IE 6 and see how crappy my site would look because of the PNGs.

On my web servers, I usually use the following:

1. OS: CentOS, or Red Hat Linux
2. Web Server: Apache 2
3. Database: MySQL 5 Community Edition
4. Dynamic page language: PHP 5
5. Page designer: Usually none, previously NVU
6. Graphic Designer: GIMP and Inkscape

i think Macromedia Dreamweaver is very well for the beginner, but again idk about the other ones.

1. OS: Windows XP SP2 (although Vista on my laptop loads everything faster)
2. Web Server: Apache
3. Database: MySQL database
4. Dynamic page language: PHP mostly
5. Page designer: none, just regular Notepad or Wordpad on Vista
6. Graphic Designer: Paint.NET

I don't use Photoshop, mainly because of the price of purchasing it. Instead, I find that Paint.NET has almost all of the features of Photoshop and has many developers working to upgrade it frequently with more options, all for one low price for $0.00.