Strangely enough: Windows.

Yes, I fucking hate Windows 10/11 for several laundry lists' worth of reasons, but you know what? At the end of the day, Windows is the only desktop OS that enables me to use my computer to do the shit I need or want to do.

So long as that fundamental principle as a tool is not violated, I will forever be thankful for Windows regardless what criticism I might have for it.

Software development is a much better experience on Linux compared to Windows (unless you stay within Visual Studio).

If you do tasks that are well supported by your OS, your experience will be mostly good. Don't run servers on MacOS, don't develop on Windows and don't game on Linux. Or do it anyway and deal with the unpolished aspects of it.

I've done lots of dev on both linux and Windows. Neither is "better" IMHO. I started on Linux, but today my main work and personal systems are both Win10. I also have a persoanl Linux laptop I use sometimes (currently Pop_OS, because I felt like trying that).

There's certain things easier on one or the other, usually caused by silly hardcoding of paths (or other OS-specific assumptions). I've run into this with python packages on Windows for sure.

My Windows dev is mostly limited to .net, and I've been writing cross-platform for years (first via Mono, now .net core / .net 6). Most challenges with cross-platform .net are caused by hardcoding Windows-specific paths and backslash (vs using Environment.* and Path.Combine()), and secondarily by using win32-specific things (eg: registry).

Tip for Windows dev use: install Windows Terminal [1], scoop [2], oh-my-posh [3], and busybox [4]. Makes the cli so much more usable, at least for someone like me with linux CLI muscle memory (ls, grep, etc).

I've found the combo of busybox utils and PowerShell is very productive. I nearly always have at least a couple terminal tabs open, and I'm nearly 50/50 of whether I use cli or explorer to browse or operate on files.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

[2] https://scoop.sh/

[3] https://ohmyposh.dev/

[4] https://scoop.sh/#/apps?q=busybox&s=0&d=1&o=true