Linux? It's as close to *ix as you can get without time traveling to ancient AT&T sites and beholding original Unix boxen. Good hardware exists, even if it take

Linux? It's as close to *ix as you can get without time traveling to ancient AT&T sites and beholding original Unix boxen. Good hardware exists, even if it takes more effort to learn how to source it. Penetration shows Linux is about the same minority Desktop OS as macOS is in general (even if statistics among Developers is sometimes lopsided). Windows? Microsoft hate and distrust aside, they are a company founded for Developers, by Developers and in general the "Developers, Developers, Developers" mantra still resonates through the halls and they try to make life easy as they can for developers. (They publish debugging symbols of the entire OS just about, as a specifically referenced point elsewhere in this thread, which affected the specific complaints of the article. Even all of the "developer unfriendly" complaints about their more recent platforms/SDKs/toolkits have mostly been walked back or are still in the process of evolving.) Just as with Linux systems, plenty of good hardware exists even if it is harder to find. WSL1 and WSL2 provide a bunch of options for how "close to *ix" you want to get. It's hard to beat Windows on penetration, because it is still the majority OS for most of the mainstream world.