&gt; 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else&#x27;s now.<p>I&#x27;ve done &quot;Windows&quot; development for about half of my 20-year career, and PHP&#x2F;Rails for the other half. (It&#x27;s all mixed together; I&#x27;m talking about overall effort.) My job, for the past 2 years, has been 100% Visual Basic .NET. (Personal projects continue in Rails.) I&#x27;m sick to death with it, and eagerly await a side gig in Rails and OS X, which should lead to a massive side project in Java. I can&#x27;t wait. I&#x27;ll take development on OS X and Linux every day of the week and twice on Sunday over Windows and Visual Studio. Some days, like today, I don&#x27;t know what I was thinking taking this job.<p>I guess it all comes down to personal preference, but today was a perfect example. I spent half the day fighting updating packages with NuGet, from one machine to another, and a sudden incompatibility with Azure database exports with my local version. Sure, there are problems with every dev environment, but it just seems so much MORE of a hassle with Visual Studio on Windows, since, for all their money and effort and marketing and the fact that they own the whole stack, the pain ought to be much LESS than the alternatives.<p>And I mostly HATE IntelliSense, always popping up and covering what I&#x27;m trying to type, and Visual Studio&#x27;s stubborn way of screwing up my code with its auto-completion of IF statements. Yet I leave it on, for the 5% of the time I want to actually use it.<p>It also doesn&#x27;t help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run. (So I do that work on my home PC.) And they run their own DNS system, which doesn&#x27;t know that about half the internet exists. Oh, and the proxy has recently started killing my application for one user at random. No, these aren&#x27;t Windows or Visual Studio&#x27;s problems, but these SORTS of problems are frequently part of a &quot;Windows development ecosystem&quot; found in large companies that pay a lot of money to rubbish consultancies.<p>I know, I know. Horses for courses.