Most stable (headache free) development environment for Ruby on Rails?

Would some of the more advanced rails developers please share what they have found to be the most 开发者_开发技巧productive combination of OS, IDE, etc. (i.e. the set-up that gives the least of amount of compatibility issues, headaches)? Also, what is the most commonly used setup?

I presume the common setup is common because it is thought to be the best compromise between all the options.

And that common setup is:

    Mac OS X
    TextMate
    rvm

There's a lot of nuance to your question, for example you'd probably want to take into account what you already have, what your appetite is for spending money, etc. This is before even coming to the minefield of personal preference. :)

Here's a starter list:

Operating System

In my experience on both, Mac > PC for Rails programming because it creates fewer unforeseen/annoying problems.

IDE

Depends on how 'rich' you like your environment to be. Some people who like light environments simply use Notepad++; others use richer options like TextMate (Mac only) or RubyMine.

General Set up

Rails 3.1, MySQL

Local Server

Webrick and Mongrel are fairly popular.

Hosting

Heroku is extremely popular for Rails apps. It's free for low traffic and they're beautifully designed for Rails. If you want to avoid the server reloading problem (webpages take a while to load if no one has requested them in a while), you can set up NewRelic or Pingdom to ping the app and keep it active.

Performance Monitoring

NewRelic

I moved from Windows for Rails 3 to a Ubuntu 11 virtual machine running on Windows via VMWare player.

I'm using Gedit along with GMate (source here) to make Gedit more similar to TextMate for Rails Development.

I've found the setup to be way faster running on the virtual machine than it was on Windows directly. It took some time to get set up but once done, I just transfer the vm image from machine to machine. The setup was all free too (besides my laptop and the copy of Windows 7 on it).

The most common development environment I suspect you'll find among the Rails illuminati is probably:

• Mac OS X (though some use Linux)
• various Ruby versions/gemsets in RVM
• TextMate or MacVim as the IDE (gvim or vim for the Linux folk, usually, though some prefer Emacs)
• SQLite or MySQL for development database
• Webrick, Mongrel, Thin, or flavour-of-the-day lightweight local webserver