Actually im 80% sure that there has been a developer kit made for VB in linux. It's fairly easy to emulate windows, especially with virtualbox, to allow windows development inside linux. I imagine with your specific tasks that they arent widespread enough among hardcore linux users to encourage someone to create the needed tools to do them in linux.
I cant stand alot of this newage control, such as DRM. I have always thrived for that freedom that linux provided, but i never really stuck to trying to learn it. I learned mandrake, and hated it. I learned redhat, and hated it. I liked slackware, but i felt like it was way more headache then it was worth to get everything working right. And over the last two years i have really wanted to get back to sticking with it, and Ubuntu makes the initial installation and setup SO much easier then the installs of past years, which was the biggest hurdle.
Once that was done and i began to use it i was in love. I have no quams with Vista Ultimate, i have been a defender of it since day one. I just perfer the lightweight, free, restriction free world of linux. I like that i can find a program that does everything an expensive windows program does, for free, and have it installed less then 5 minutes after hearing its name for the first time. At often 1/3 of the size. My fully configured linux system with all my software used around 6GB of hard drive space. My CPU useage at idle was less then 5%, and of my 2GB of ram less then 500MB was in use. With vista my fully configured system used almost 40GB of disk space, never idled under 20% load, and used no less then 750MB of ram.
Now i only have that one computer as far as the loads for comparison, but the hard drive usage alone is a major improvement. I will continue to use both, because sometimes when i had linux i would struggle for hours to figure something out on my own, only to find Virtualbox wont do what i need and i need windows. The only reason i had no Vista partition on my last laptop was that i dedicated the hard drive to ubuntu and did not feel like going through all the partitioning and boot manager crap to get vista back on. The other benifit to both is not everyone is a computer nerd, ie my other half lol.
