I wouldn't particularly care that it's linux but I'd sort of take it as a bit of a red flag that even as a startup you're so obsessed with controlling your empl

I wouldn't particularly care that it's linux but I'd sort of take it as a bit of a red flag that even as a startup you're so obsessed with controlling your employees. One of the reasons people want to work at startups is because they get to be more independent and free. It also tells me that you're planning on hiring a low standard of employee who is not capable of figuring out deployment issues on their own platforms. Seriously, if you're hiring half good people they will be figuring out and telling you how to deploy to whatever platform they like best. FWIW, my preferred development environment is still ... Windows. Even though I spend most of my day typing unix commands (either to servers, VMs, or in my Cygwin prompt). I have about a hundred utilities that I've slowly cultivated over the years and these make me as efficient as hell. I'd actually like to have a good reason to switch such as a company mandate though :-)