Which OS is more suitable for programming?

[zacs7]

VMware emulates a new OS using pure software (it uses an instruction re-writing translation mechanism to make things 'safe,') and while it's slower, it is not crippled by any means.

If it's slower, performance is crippled no matter how you word it.

So, without going off topic and raging a distro war...
You could safely conclude, that both Windows and Linux are fine for programming, and you may like to choose both, either dual-boot or emulated.

[@nthony]

I see everyone suggesting VMWare, how does Microsoft Virtual PC stack up to it?
Also, I see there is some magic that allows *nix OS's to read NTFS, however can they be setup to run entirely on NTFS?

[zacs7]

You can run boot linux off an NTFS partition, therefore you can set it up to run completely on NTFS. You can also set-up Windows to read ext3.