I am certainly open to the idea of being surprised by this -- there very well could be more developers using Microsoft as the operating system they use for their development machine, however I do wonder if the population of Stack Overflow users is a good, un-skewed sample of all developers.
I don't think too many people would be using Windows if it were really bad for Linux based development. I sure as heck wouldn't be.
In an ideal world I would be running native Linux but I had trouble with some audio gear not working and my favorite video editing tool doesn't run in Linux, nor do some of the games I play -- so I use Windows because that's what's available.
As much as I hate to say it, Windows is a pretty good environment to do every day developer things + more.
For example I spent 95% of my time in WSL using tmux and terminal Vim to write code full time (with fzf and everything you would expect on the command line). It's really fast. The wsltty terminal has almost as low input latency as xterm on native Linux (which I run on my modified Chromebook). While developing all sorts of web apps (Flask, Phoenix, Rails, Webpack, etc.) inside of Docker the volume performance is fast enough where I never once had complaints even on 5 year old hardware.
Then I'm a hotkey away from opening any program with command line launchers, switching virtual desktops with other hotkeys, running VMs for testing server deployments, recording and editing videos and playing any games I want without having to think twice about it or dual boot.
Other than bullshit telemetry and forced updates, Windows 10 Pro is not that bad from an all around "I use my computer to do stuff" perspective. I think that's ultimately why Windows is so popular. It also helps that you can put together a beast of a machine for about $750. But with that said I would instantly switch to Linux if all of my Linux problems were suddenly fixed.
In the mean time, if anyone is interested, I have a bunch of blog posts and videos showing how I set everything up in Windows. It can all be found here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i-use
As much as I hate to say it, Windows is a pretty good environment to do every day developer things + more.
I keep thinking about the eventual replacement for my MacBook Pro. Every time I hear something like this, every time I see MS's open source contributions, etc. I keep thinking about Windows as a replacement.
At the top of the list of reasons why that's unlikely to happen is shit like these dark patterns to enforce invasive telemetry. I don't care how good WSL is, I don't want to be spied on or coerced into allowing spyware to run.
The rest of the list is mostly: I don't believe/agree with you. I've used chocolataey (ugh), and I don't want to do all of my development in a VM. I recently set up a Win 7 VM to get a small C# library built. Turns out it was easier to build it on my Mac and copy it over.
Other than bullshit telemetry and forced updates
Let me stop you right there. I'm not going to consider anything with forced spyware and forced updates. Until those are fixed I don't care about the rest.
> The rest of the list is mostly: I don't believe/agree with you.
All of what I mentioned is documented on my site and in a lot of cases I've recorded and published unedited videos of my WSL (v1) / Docker based dev environment.
You are free to believe what you want, but I'm not lying. If it were not as good as a claimed I wouldn't be using it for full time development / video creation.
Chocolatey had so much promise, but it just doesn't deliver. At least in my experience, software tends to be outdated, and the packaging often of dubious quality. There are also multiple packages available for a lot of software, so you don't know which one to choose. Oh, and the Chocolatey website is pretty awful too.
I do like scoop, but of course the selection available is much smaller than Chocolatey, at least for now.
Come to think of it, it's kind of strange that Microsoft never created a packaging system for Windows (aside from the Store; I mean for non-UWP apps).
Check out the VS Code SSH remote, if your internet is good enough or if you have a spare computer lying around, you can develop as if it's 'on the desktop' but you get none of the friction and all of the bare metal speed, I switched from terminal VIM a few years ago and the intellisense makes it worth it. There is a VSVim plugin that is... pretty good if you haven't gone too far down the VIM rabbit hole (my usage was and still is pretty basic).
