"Forced" might be a strong word, and I'm new to non-startups so I don't know what kind of admin lock down is on the box. So I'm trying to do as I'm told until I have a reason I can't...
In my (albeit somewhat limited) experience with different dev. companies, it's no (big) issue to use the distro that you're most comfortable with. For me this is OSX, but I've also ran Linux (Ubuntu/Mint) in a primarily Windows oriented company. The only "issue" was that I was my own tech-support in the case where something might not work.
