This article is the perfect summary of everything that's wrong with the existing HW development toolchains for FPGAs. The best bit is the windows-only version

This article is the perfect summary of everything that's wrong with the existing HW development toolchains for FPGAs. The best bit is the windows-only version of the Xillinx gooware that in fact installs a Linux virtual box on windows to finally get to run the tools it needs. Oh, and yeah : there's a lame protection in there that checks it's running on a specific virtual box with a specific MAC address. Amazing (not in a good way).