You should give him reasons why.

Personally I find Win7 has a far superior interface to OSX and out-of-box linux distros if you like using your keyboard and a minimal\no-shortcut desktop. The taskbar looks great left-aligned which, ideal for widescreen monitors. To open any program all you have to do is press the Windows key on your keyboard and type 2 or 3 letters for an autocomplete to find it, then press enter. No menus or shortcuts necessary. The only downside is installing CygWin for BASH, but I'd rather do that than install WINE for Adobe.

OS X has the Spotlight which people use in the same way: one hot-key, two letters to find your app by name, and enter.

I recently went back to Windows 7 as my main workstation. So far the only negative has been that access to Steam and great games has had a slight negative effect on my productivity. What, objectively, is so much better and easier under Linux? Note, we're talking dev machine here, and not deployment server.

"What, objectively, is so much better and easier under Linux? Note, we're talking dev machine here, and not deployment serv"

Tool chaining. For me, the ease with which I can bang out scripts and makefiles and have the tools easily check out versioned code from rcs/svn and that I can pipe and redirect and have a host of efficient tools like grep and nm and objdump and more, and they all work together piping and redirecting to make exactly what I want in so many easily altered configurations. Release and debug and partial debug and static-checking build and more, with all the makefiles just text - so easy to alter and tweak and copy and share (and even have them configure on the fly, reading the output from the compilation and rerunning with extra warnings or debug symbols) and have them run commands themselves like sending eMails to everyone who is listed as an interested party on the source controlled spec list, and so much more. Valgrind is so useful that if I have to develop on a Win32 machine I get a version of it going under MinGw, and sometimes I run a Win32 debug under Wine on Linux so I can use Valgrind on it.

I sound like the biggest *nix dev env fanboy ever.

Do I mean under MinGW? I forget. Maybe I never got that to work and that's why I use Wine under Lin.

Terrible advice and tribalist. Your platform doesn't matter, work what you are comfortable with rather than spending months being awkward because some random guy on HN told you windows sucks.

You didn't even give a reason why OS X or Linux are better, which tells everybody you are just a zealot (and the people who upvoted you are as well).

Here's the reason: your web server is likely to be running using Linux, so you should have some familiarity with that. If you've always used Windows, Linux will be yet another thing to learn when you get to the point of hosting your web app. If you've been using Mac OS X or Linux as your primary computer all along you'll be comfortable with it since you use it on a daily basis. With Mac OS X, you can ease yourself into Linux.

"You didn't even give a reason why OS X or Linux are better, which tells everybody you are just a zealot"

Actually, I didn't give a reason hoping that it would spark an intelligent discussion with other people sharing information about pros and cons. I was opening the topic. I can understand how it looked like zealotry and tribalism to you.

If Rails is in the picture, this is actually good advice. Not that you can't work around Windows, but why would you want to?

Better still, use Google App Engine then it won't matter in the slightest.