At work I'm tied to a windows machine, however I have been able to use GNU/Linux which is where I'm most productive. First, I tried working with Portable Ubuntu. It works pretty well, however the latency can be a little high sometimes (Firefox being the most obvious case that I noticed). About a week ago I started working on a clustering experiment and wanted to give it a shot inside Portable Ubuntu. However, I discovered it wasn't possible because its kernel doesn't support bridging (I was going to use some qemu virtual machines for the experiment).