I wanted to take a quick poll to find out which type of operating system is most preferred by the owner and creators. I use Ubuntu and MONO, however I am curious what y'all use.
Forced to use windows 7 and xp until someone will develop a bare-bones minimalist gaming OS.
There are Linux builds for this kind of thing but the wide range support isn't there yet. There is also a Windows Server 2012 'workstation' that can be used as a bare-bones windows desktop OS but again you have to finagle it to work for certain games and some games can't run at all on it.
Edit: So I'm forced to use xp and 7 with 80%+ of the services disabled along with other windows pre-actived on install crap. Linux is the best option in reality. It is just not entry level friendly, which is a huge barrier for the avg person. Also i bloody hate video game console and I believe they are the #1 reason that companies like Microsoft do not make a bare bones gaming OS on PC.
I've never hosted a shard, just run one locally to have something to code with. It's more about the coding for me. That's where the fun really is .
If I were to ever host one though it would probably be on my Windows 7 machine or a VM running on said machine. It's still a beast of a machine even though it's a couple years old now. i7-2600 3.4GHz quad core with 16 GB ram.