I'm increasingly surprised that this matters at all to software developers. Software developers aren't afraid of changing UI. (In fact, they usually are the on

I'm increasingly surprised that this matters at all to software developers. Software developers aren't afraid of changing UI. (In fact, they usually are the ones inflicting that upon others.) So, it shouldn't matter where your menus are, how you switch between applications, how the file browser displays files. The technical differences between operating systems are huge, but they all support the same day-to-day features: they all multitask reasonably well, they all have or support reasonable filesystems, they all support a lot of different kinds of hardware (and most of what you're likely to need to use). Worst-case scenario, you can fall back on multiboot or virtualization to fill in a few gaps. Software developers spend most of their time in just a few applications: a text editor or IDE of some sort, a web browser, maybe an ssh client. There are perfectly usable options for each of those on each operating system. So ... seriously, what does it matter? I have a mild preference for Debian/KDE, but I could do most of my work on MacOS (in fact, I did in the past) or Windows, with just a couple of days of tweaking and setup. The only possible spot where Windows might fall down a bit for me would be in supporting a locally-hosted LAMP setup, and even then there's WampServer (http://www.wampserver.com/en/ http://www.wampserver.com/en/).