I think the main use case is developer workstations which run on Windows because of corporate guidlines

I'm probably the rare developer who prefers the UI and feel of Windows to OSX.. though I am probably a prototypical use case to switch to Mint, but haven't got around to it.

I feel comfortable with all the UIs, but essentially I want to be as close to my application's production environment as possible, while still being productive. I've never worked on a team where that environment was windows, and setting up node/ruby/docker/vim/bash/nginx in a windows environment has always been a total pain compared to either linux or OS X (still kind of a pain for docker, but slightly less so).

For some of these core tools, authors explicitly state that windows is a second class citizen. It's just not worth the expense to support something that has so few comparative users, in some cases (ruby). It's a lot of work for something that will never feel "native".

I feel that Windows 7 was really the pinnacle UI for desktops... I kind of dig Unity, as it's similar enough for me. I do prefer a bash prompt to CMD though.

I don't think node on Windows is so bad these days once you've got Python 2.x and VS 2015 Community installed... When I started with node (0.6-0.8 era), it was pretty bad in Windows. These days most popular modules just work, or work once you have gyp prereq's installed.

Maybe we're both rare, but I think Windows 7 and Windows 10 are both really nice, as is the Edge browser. I've been considering switching from OSX. It seems like it should be relatively convenient with tools like Vagrant to develop on Windows but run, test, and deploy on Linux. But I haven't tested this hypothesis yet.

As long as you get Windows 10 Pro, you get Hyper-V... I have an always-on linux VM that I SSH a few terminals to and map a drive via SAMBA on the VM to my desktop, so I can edit in a windows GUI, but interact in Linux... it works pretty well, and tbh is usually easier than the odd edge case with windows, unless you're a C/C++ guy.

This sounds really cool. I don't know much about Hyper-V and SAMBA – any good links to get me started?

Hyper-V is just a VM environment that comes with some versions of windows... It's not really too much different than VMWare, Parallels or VirtualBox... It does have an option to start in the background on machine start on the desktop version.

So I installed Ubuntu Server (latest) in a Virtual Machine via Hyper-V... set it to auto-boot.. setup OpenSSH, setup Samba ... I kind of just muddled through it, to be honest.. after that, I setup Docker, build-essentials and nvm, which covered my needs there.

On the windows side, I use Clover as an explorer replacement (file explorer, not the desktop), and use ConEmu for tabbed shell interfaces. It works pretty well for me. I use GUI stuff in windows, and the linux side via SSH.

Thanks, this is helpful. I'm a seasoned muddler myself, so I'm sure I can figure it out.