I'm not a Windows developer but I've tried my hand and work with a lot of people who are getting into the things described in the article using Windows. Things

I'm not a Windows developer but I've tried my hand and work with a lot of people who are getting into the things described in the article using Windows. Things really are harder and it's something I've been trying to explain to people I'm mentoring and they're finding it out the hard way. The thing about that statement is that a lot of times people will start a holy war over it. No one is saying Windows sucks here. It may or may not suck but that's beside the point. The reality of the situation today is that the majority of the open source community is creating things that will eventually be running on a Linux server. IIS is just not used all that much at all outside the corporate space and even they are moving toward Red Hat these days. But any time I explain to someone that they'd have a much easier time on a Mac or Linux distro they start an argument and give me that "you're an elitist" look. I'll tell them to use Git but they need a special program for it. I show them SSH and they need another app for that. Same for Ruby, most local dev servers, etc. and then every mundane command for me turns into twice the work for them because they have to do what I'm doing plus whatever extra steps plus configuration on their machines. It's really frustrating for them and they give up. A lot of times a person who has learned some basic HTML and CSS who wants to level up and start doing some version control and set up a remote server ends up giving up on the whole thing. So the whole ecosystem really is different as everything is built with a nix environment in mind. I'd been working on a Mac for a long time and needed a laptop. I got a cheap Windows laptop and thought I'd dual boot with Xubuntu so that I could deal with certain Windows file types and have an easy way to test sites in IE. Well, I ended up booting to Windows less than 10 times in 6 months and eventually got rid of it altogether because there was nothing Windows did that my Mac or Xubuntu couldn't. I even tried to write so,e desktop software and do some web dev and found that Windows is awesome for desktop apps... If you're only developing for Windows... and Windows is great for web development... if you plan to use an IIS production environment and/or you're going to program in ASP.net or C# exclusively. But again, this isn't a Windows bashing party here. It's just the reality of working with open source and web dev in 2012. There are certainly things that make nix systems difficult to work with depending on the context but as it stands we're living in a time where *nix is the default platform for web development.