Nicely done :-)
Make that 110% if you include Visual Studio. The degree of polish that Visual Studio has just isn't available anywhere else. At some point early this year I was considering Linux+VSCode. VS2017, with F5-to-Docker debug, launched and everything else looks like a giant pain in the ass once again. The Azure integration is anticompetitive but, wow, is it also so much better than the alternative.
XCode is a hilarious joke that Apple is playing on developers.
Linux IDEs, while much better than XCode, would have been competitive in 2003 (unless you use Java/IntelliJ exclusively).
It's no wonder that Windows is the only platform where developers shy away from text editors - it's the only platform where the alternatives to text editors don't absolutely suck. It's really not that text editors are better than IDEs - an good IDE and a good text editor are complementary, not competitive.
Where I'm going with this is that a good IDE begets a quality application. That 100% doesn't arise from the ether. Alongside your game argument comes another indicator of this: Windows has a very mature graphical debugger[1] (having been growing it since DX9) where, so far as I have read, both competing operating systems lack this functionality entirely.
Balmer might have looked like a fool with his "developers, developers, developers" dance. The thing is that he was completely correct - instead of mocking his monkey dancing, Apple and Linux should have been paying attention to the people that he was praising.
If Ubuntu want to compete in this space the developer experience must be fixed.
I like Windows more than before but people saying VS is fantastic are starting to annoy me.
My VS crashed 3 times today (!). This comes on top of almost not having any refactoring support unless you buy ReSharper.
I was really excited to get to try .Net three months ago.
Now I'm really looking forward to go back to Java and Netbeans (even if I will miss some things.)
It's no wonder that Windows is the only platform where developers shy away from text editors
This developer love Netbeans on KDE.
This is why vim is a hell of a lot more useful to me on linux than on windows. In Linux, I actually prefer vim over sublime. In windows, I use sublime over vim.
It's not simply a matter of polish, the environments are completely different, and therefore the tools that are successful on the platforms are completely different.
When an IDE doesn't do something the way you want it done and you find yourself fighting it, I can totally understand not wanting to deal with it. On the other hand, if your IDE works the way you want it to, it can increase your productivity.
I wish this were true. A great development environment (integrated or not) will get you to the finish line faster, but it doesn't automatically produce quality. Have you downloaded anything from the Windows Store lately?
You (and many others) don't like XCode, yet developers using it have produced some marvelous software on macOS. For example, I think The Omni Group folks have made some applications that work great, look great, and are a joy to use.
If deep pockets was all it took to make an OS succeed, Windows Phone wouldn't be dead.
On the desktop, OSX, Windows, and most Linux variants are all good enough. What matters is application support. For my job, 50% of the applications I use run on Linux, 75% run on OSX (natively), and 100% work on Windows. Can you guess which OS I use at work?
Thanks to Valve, Linux has a real shot at picking up some steam in the gaming space. Without Adobe and Microsoft, it probably won't go anywhere on corporate or consumer desktops.