I'm entirely a Linux person and would never want to use anything else. However, I think Windows really isn't that bad as a development platform--probably not th

I'm entirely a Linux person and would never want to use anything else. However, I think Windows really isn't that bad as a development platform--probably not the most fashionable idea in the HN crowd. I know developers--experienced ones, at that--who are very efficient on Windows. There are now tools like Powershell that give Windows the functionality you'd need. While Windows is still proprietary and annoying, I don't think that just having a unix env is enough to be so much better than Windows. Of course, Linux is the best option for me because I'm used to it and can leverage it completely--and I'm sure it's the case for you too--but I've seen too many people efficiently using Windows to just ignore it out of hand. (Well, I can safely ignore it because it's proprietary, but that's completely unrelated to the topic at hand.)