Windows is great for development and so are other platforms. People who claim that OSX is better are simply biased or drinking the typical apple fan boy kool ai

Windows is great for development and so are other platforms. People who claim that OSX is better are simply biased or drinking the typical apple fan boy kool aid. If anything, I would compare the development tools and in that sense Visual Studio is the best IDE out there! My schooling was in Solaris, Windows and Unix. About 15-20 years ago open-source software was mostly available on nix variants and not as much on Windows. Most people didn't want to pay for software, so they chose nix... OSX happens to be a variant of FreeBSD (if I remember correctly), so it can run everything that runs in *nix. IMO, it was mainly used by graphics designers because of better hardware and some standard software that came with OS X. I think if you looked at Photoshop, you could do the same things regardless of the OS. At home, I use Windows on a Macbook because I like the form factor of the Macbook and because Windows makes me more productive. I've done startups / developed under various platforms and there's not a single system where you're restricted....other than typical iOS stuff on the Mac and Windows Phone stuff on Windows. With new frameworks, you can develop for any mobile platform on any OS. I think OS X fans have probably based their opinion off of a handful of issues they've faced in Windows. Nobody seems to compare and contrast specific issues where Mac is a winner. People that complain about Windows have probably not tried to install and configure remotely complex products on Linux like mail servers for instance. Their complaints are not usually first hand experiences. IIS on the other hand was a PITA to configure in Windows, but it really isn't as bad as people made it look. I've coded in many languages/frameworks on Windows just fine: - NodeJS / Server side JS - Python - C++ - C - Java - Ruby / RoR - R - Matlab - Web based HTML5 / JS - C# - VB The only time I was forced to use OS X was for developing iOS apps around in 2007. As far as your CS degree goes, I would start out with learning typical core computing concepts: - Algorithms - Data structures - Processor Architecture - Compilers - Memory Management - Etc. In addition, I would keep a few different kinds of OS's handy and set up the same stuff across all of them to see how it's done and what the issues are. Along the way, keep blogging about your experience so you can always refer to it. This helped me quite a lot in picking the right platforms before venturing into a new project. And btw, I write software in Windows that runs on all OS's and cloud services (although we're sticking with Azure for now).