Why use a loaded word like 'force'? Developing on Windows was excellent. Microsoft provides great tools and support; it was incredibly productive. The only real negative is the licensing requirements.
It's interesting to see the culture of development differ so much from place to place. When I worked in Australia, Windows was an incredibly common development environment, while here in Silicon Valley it's all Mac/Linux.
Yes, but my point was that there is no evidence that is the majority, nor are they really 'forced' to use it - if it's that much of an issue, just don't take the job (as you say).
Many, many developers have no issue developing on Windows or even enjoy it. There seems to be a mindset amongst certain people that Windows developers are not 'real' developers, which is what I'm arguing against.
I say "force" because a lot of employers simply do not allow developers to choose their workstation OS. Windows is very popular with the non-programmers responsible for making IT purchasing deals within most major corporations. Among programmers, it's not quite so popular.
It still depends on what programmers you ask. Windows works fine for me, Linux did not work well when I tried it (but it was many years ago). Unix through XWindows from a pc was actually quite nice.
I think developers like users use feelings more than thoughts when choosing an environment. Yes, you can do some things on Linux that are harder on Windows but saying that missing "grep" is severly limiting you is strange since it is easy to install. And you have find in most editors. You can run Vim or Emacs if you want to on Windows. Powershell is very good but with a strange syntax. If that is someones problem they sound like they don't want to learn something new. Listing thousands of files in a folder is probably still faster on Linux but I rarely do that (I can't see the point in collecting many years of logs in one folder, for example). The main problem I have with Windows is that I have to restart the computer every now and then.
Yes, the way Windows locks shared DLLs and requires a restart of the whole OS instead of just the programs currently using the DLL when you install an update is, in a word, obnoxious.
Also, again I dislike the fact that Windows is inherently GUI-centric. Interacting with programs is designed to be done using primarily the mouse or a touch screen. Even Windows Server is designed to be used via remote desktop. Whereas for UNIX-compliant OSes the desktop and mouse are not required for anything, a skilled user can easily be more productive using only a keyboard, and anything a user can do can just as easily be placed in a script and automated.
Package management is also a major deficiency of Windows. Chocolatey is a nice workaround, but is a relatively young project. Windows did not have any package management for a long time.
Also for a lot of programming language packages with native code extensions, it can be difficult or even impossible to get them to compile on Windows. I can think of a handful of Ruby packages that flat-out do not compile, making Rails dev on Windows a non-starter.
> Developing on Windows was excellent. Microsoft provides great tools and support; it was incredibly productive.
I don't know about that. I've made several good faith efforts to really see what people like about the Windows development ecosystem, and I consistently come away dismayed. "Great tools and support" could never be used to describe msbuild, for example. Or any of the MSDN documentation with incredible antipattern code that people like to blithely copy and paste into their programs. Visual Studio is slow, brittle, and makes it difficult to do version control right.
I could list examples for days but that's not the point. Nowhere is perfect, but there's no way anyone could consider Microsoft a clear leader here.
Windows does have virtual desktops...just not the way X allows. The main thing that bugs me about Windows's desktops is that it is given a logical display surface compromised of all the display units. Whereas with X (going by my use of xmonad) it's easy to separate the display and desktop abstractions and have desktop 2 on display 1 and desktop 5 on display 2.
Also note, if I'm remembering correctly, there are native virtual desktops slated to come with Windows 10. Kinda late to the game, but it's nice that they're finally getting them.
As of 2011 (I couldn't find more recent data publicly available) Windows was far and away the most popular development environment. http://www.cnet.com/news/coders-choosing-mac-os-over-linux-e...
It's interesting to see the culture of development differ so much from place to place. When I worked in Australia, Windows was an incredibly common development environment, while here in Silicon Valley it's all Mac/Linux.