I generally fall into the microcontroller-fogey side of these debates. But the other side has an advantage in that "just use linux" is an easy, dumb choice tha

I generally fall into the microcontroller-fogey side of these debates. But the other side has an advantage in that "just use linux" is an easy, dumb choice that brings you into contact with the whole unix ecosystem. There's always a certain cheezyness to your tools when doing what I think of as real embedded work. Probably the only nice part of it is the basic GNU compiler toolchain (if present). The rest -- including any high level development tools -- are either closed source, vendor specific stuff of varying quality or low quality half dead open-source projects.