In my (anecdotal) experience: A lot of tools (everything from editors to compilers, etc.) that are open source are from the Unix world. They're designed to work

In my (anecdotal) experience: A lot of tools (everything from editors to compilers, etc.) that are open source are from the Unix world. They're designed to work in a POSIX way and the ports to Windows (if they exist, or you're forced to use Cygwin) are a bit cludgy: You might just as well have used some kind of Unix in the first place. Windows dev tools are available, of course, but you often have to pay quite a lot for them. Good OSS exists for Windows, but it's a subset of what's readily available under nix, which doesn't encourage the hacker/hobbyist spirit.